Colors Go! Color Lines Mutant Game

I am a longtime fan of balls (which are Color Lines) - I like to collect lines, set a new record. And he always wanted to make some kind of a similar game: to be both casually and with the opportunity for a more thoughtful game. But, there was no idea. Until one day before the new year, I didn’t drink too much, I decided not to use the New Year holidays to good use, and try to create my own puzzle. And about what happened, I want to tell in this article.

What game to do?

I didn’t succeed in coming up with a new game. I put together a bunch of multi-colored buttons and tried to move them differently, move them according to some rules, assemble them into groups, etc. But everything that turned out was too cumbersome, unclear and simply uninteresting. And once the game turned out (more precisely, the rules were invented), which, upon closer examination, turned out to be mutated spots.

Then I thought - why not try to improve the Color Lines themselves? I always did not like the control in 2 clicks. This is not a problem on the desktop, but when playing on the phone, tapping twice on small cells is not user friendly (especially if it happens in shaky vehicles). Is it possible to preserve (at least partially) the advantages of Color Lines, but at the same time make control in one tap?

New rules

Let's take a look at how the controls in Color Lines work. At each turn, the player sets the following parameters:

• ball (first click)
• end position (second click)
• ball route (specified implicitly by rules)

Let's try to get rid of the second click. It turns out that the player must set the following parameters under his own power:

• ball (first click)
• end position (specified implicitly by rules)
• ball route (specified implicitly by rules)

In other words, you need to come up with such rules that would uniquely set the route and the final position of the ball, which the player decided to click on.

The simplest thing that comes to mind: the route is direct, and the end point of the route is determined by the impossibility of further movement of the ball (the end of the board, another ball standing in the way). Doesn’t resemble anything?

This is almost exactly the Zuma rule, only there the player selects the final position with the tap (direction of the ball shot), and the ball itself (color) is set by the rules of the game (randomly generated):



And then the idea came up to cross Color Lines with Zuma. Let there be a board and a “snake” of balls moving around it. The player can tap on any ball on the snake and it will fly to the board and will move in a straight line until it hits something. As in Zoom, the “snake” moves to fill the gap. And the player’s task is still to collect chains of the same color.

Several prototypes were made and after playing with them I came to this option:



The “snake” moves clockwise: new balls appear in the upper left corner. The lower left ball is locked. I tried to make the “snake” move on, twisting in a spiral around the board, but it was too difficult to perceive during the game.

The size of the board has become smaller so that the balls are not too small on the mobile phones, and the length of the chain of balls that needs to be assembled is reduced to 3 (where now without match-3?).

Development

Having decided on the rules, it remained to make the game itself. From the point of view of code, it is simple, but from the point of view of design, I had to tinker.

Since the cells of the board turned out to be unequal under the new rules, I wanted to somehow highlight the “snake” cells so that the player understood the essence of what was happening on the board. There were attempts to make cells painted under a snake crawling around the board, and to highlight these cells with a darker color, and make the balls on the “snake” larger. But all this led to the fact that the board was “cluttered” and poorly understood.

In the end, I decided to abandon the classic plaque in the cage and replace it with a ruler for the Go game. In my opinion, this option turned out to be the simplest visually, and in addition, emphasizing the essence of the game - balls moving in straight lines. In this case, the “snake” is simply indicated by the darker color of the



ruler : Also, the new line suggested the name for the game - Colors Go. There’s a hint of popular games (Hitman Go) and the Go board. Yes, and it sounds cheerful and dynamic.

And of course I screwed the leaderboards and Facebook to the game, so that it would be possible to conveniently measure the ChSV with both familiar people and the whole world.

results

The result is a game. According to reviews of people who managed to test - it is quite playable.

The strategic component remained, albeit in a simplified form. If the game is inevitably lost in the balls, then in Colors Go, you can theoretically play endlessly if you sort the rubble in time. Such a balance was made specifically so that the game was not overly complicated, and the success of 1010 (which has a similar balance of complexity) inspired.

And I also concluded for myself that an attempt to improve an existing project can provide much more useful ideas than brainstorming from scratch.