Yeah! We’re back for round 2 of my awesome design brief adventures! ( I just noticed that the more I go forward with this, the more I treat it like a game show where I am the host, or something like that. That’s just how I see these articles now. Well, I guess I’ll just roll with it for the time being )
So last time I was choosing my brief, and little to no surprise, I actually chose….
( No drum rolling, I promised XD )
Design a match 3 puzzle game on the face of a cube
Whohoo! So yeah, this looks to be quite an easy brief, I specifically chose it to help me catch up with the rest of the course work, and to use some code scripts for my other projects ( oh didn’t I mention that I should, at least attempt to, code this game? On second thought this will not be as easy as I though 
).
So, what do I have in store for this one?
I bounced through a bunch of ideas, like 3D puzzles where you have to watch the same scene trough looking at different faces of the cube and having cool mind-bending prospectives.
Or a match three where you have to switch and rotate the whole faces to make combinations of the edges on the faces and edges.
Then I remembered that I cannot code any of this stuff.
So I reverted back to a simpler design, the very first idea I and probably most of you had. I mean, really? Cube…. 3 tiles…. move them around…. it’s basically a fancy Rubik’s cube game that only awaits to be made!
So the design of the game so far is the following: a 2D game where you control a Rubik’s cube in the usual way ( selecting a row or column and rotating it ) where your objective is to match three tiles of the same color next to each other, to make them pop and get points. When those tiles disappear, you get a new set of tiles with different random colors.
Compete for most points or put stupid objectives on the face of the cube and…. that’s it!
It’s simple yet really elegant design that requires very little meddling.
The only change I would make is to add a Tetris moment ( as of tetris the move in Tetris the game ) where popping four columns at once feels awesome and rewarding to set up and execute, so I would make possible to do face clear, like completing a whole face with the same color at once. As is it’s impossible, normally I would change the rules to be a match four instead of three and try it out, but the brief specifies it’s match THREE nature and I must abide. So the next best thing would be an ability, maybe tied to a meter of sorts, that would basically stop tiles from popping up as long as the effect is active, and to pop them up all together and reward you with amazing score bonuses once they do. This mechanic, inspired by a similar meter in Tetris effect would make the gameplay far deeper, and allow players that want to get better at the game, far more depth to delve into; while also rewarding the typical setup centric gameplay that Rubik’s cube is centered around.
That’s it for today’s article, we’ll se how things follow suit with this brief. Until next tiiime 🙂
The Art of Game Design 