Match-3, first version - 18/08/2017

A Classical Match-3 puzzle game demo created in Unity.

This is my first demo which I decided to start after about a month in learning Unity, because I wanted my hands get dirty with the real stuff.  And yes they definitely got dirty.  :) It took me a bit longer than a month to bring the game to this current stage and I learned a lot during this time.

My last and biggest encounter during the development was how to handle the different states of the game.  My first solution was to use a bunch of IEnumerator and Coroutine on top of each other, to force the game routine to follow one step after another. When I was almost finished with the game I realized that the program  became too complicated for me to be able to handle effectively all possible stages. My final solution was to work with the combination of Finite State Machine and Event Handling to handle the changes between the 3 different layers of game states. One  layer for the basic game cycle, one for handling the events on the board, and one for the mouse.  

It took me some time to figure out the different states and their relation to each other on paper. Of course the paper formula's flaws got exposed during implementation so I had to modify the original idea quite much. Still the basic "state map" looks kind of cool, so I want to show you:

I like nice looking games, so I tried to make mine look nice too, which is largely due to free assets and fonts, for what I am grateful:

• Skybox V2 (Nebula) Unity Asset from HedgeHog Team
• Post Processing Stack Unity Asset from Unity Technologies
• SF Intellivised Font Package from ShyFoundry
• and Blender for the cubes :)

Plans for later: the game is in big need of some sounds, effects and special cubes. So I would like to work on that first. Later, I hope to build up different levels with different kind of layouts and difficulty. 

I hope you will enjoy this little game, as much as I enjoyed creating it.

(Even if it did make me cry once. - Though no worries, you are not in such a danger, it was just because a bug which took me hours to hunt down just before the finish. But I won! )