I’ve spent roughly the last month trying to come up with a solid concept for my next game. I don’t want a straight clone of some existing game mechanic, but neither do I want to be an extreme pioneer.

Casual gamers have a strong preference for match-3 style gameplay in it’s various forms, and that’s what I’m trying to come up with.

When I started, I thought it would be easy to come up with a fresh variation on the color-matching theme. There are an immense number of ways that one can manipulate and match objects - surely I could come up with a good one…

And yet, I went through many quick prototypes without finding any that really stood out. They all seemed good in theory, but when I implemented them (crudely), they didn’t hold up real well.

Finally, today, I may have hit something. Someone encouraged me to re-think one of my early concepts that I’d discarded. I took some of that concept, and some of my latest concept (which wasn’t working well), did a mash-up, and I think I’ve got a winner. I had my wife try it - I had to hold our baby while she tested it. The baby started crying, then wailing, but my wife kept playing the prototype. Normally I’d be irritated about that (I am not good at pacifying the baby), but this time I was actually kinda glad.

Then again, it’s Friday night, and maybe when I look at it again on Monday morning it’ll seem bland.

Anyways, all I can say for now is that it’s a match-3 game that looks a bit like Collapse, but doesn’t play anything like it (very different mechanics). Will it emerges as a finished game several months from now? Who knows…

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2006 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Game Biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.