Colors Go! Mutant game from Color Lines

I am a longtime fan of balls (which are Color Lines) - I like to pick lines, set a new record. And he always wanted to make some kind of similar game: so that it was both casual and with the possibility for a more thoughtful game. But, there was no idea. So far, somehow, for the new year, I did not drink too much. I did not decide to use the New Year holidays with benefit, and still try to make my own puzzle. And about what happened, I want to tell in this article.

What game to do?

I did not manage to invent a new game. I gathered a bunch of colorful buttons and tried to move them differently, move them according to some rules, form groups, etc. But all that worked was too cumbersome, unclear and just uninteresting. And once it turned out the game (or rather, they came up with the rules), which, upon closer examination, turned out to be modified pyatons.

Then I thought - why not try to improve Color Lines themselves? I always didn’t like management in 2 clicks. This is not a problem on the desktop, but when playing on the phone, tapping twice in small cells is not user friendly (especially if it happens in a shaking vehicle). Is it possible to preserve (at least partially) the merits of Color Lines, but at the same time make management in one tap?
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New rules

Let's look at how the management in Color Lines is arranged. At each turn, the player sets the following parameters:

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

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

• ball (first click)
• end position (set implicitly by the rules)
• ball route (set implicitly by the 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 is that the route is a straight line, and the final 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). Nothing like?

These are almost exactly the rules of Zuma, only there the player chooses the final position by tap (the direction of the ball shot), and the ball (color) is determined by the rules of the game (randomly generated):



And then there was the idea 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 he will fly out on the board and will move in a straight line until he stops at something. As in Zuma, the “snake” shifts filling the gap formed. And the task of the player is still to collect chains of the same color.

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



“Snake” moves clockwise: new balls appear in the upper left corner. The bottom left ball is fixed. I tried to make the “snake” move further, twisting in a spiral around the board, but it turned out to be too difficult for perception during the game.

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

Development

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

Since the cells of the board turned out to be unequal under the new rules, I wanted to somehow isolate the “snake” cells so that the player would understand the essence of what is happening on the board. There were attempts to make the cells painted under the snake crawling around the board, and to highlight these cells in 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.

As a result, I decided to abandon the classic board in a cage and replace it with a rug for the game of Go. In my opinion, this option turned out to be the easiest visually, and in addition, emphasizing the essence of the game - balls moving in straight lines. In this case, the "snake" is simply denoted by the darker color of the line:



Also, the new line suggested the name for the game - Colors Go. Here and a hint of popular games (Hitman Go) and the board from the game Go. And it sounds cheerful and dynamic.

And of course I screwed the leaderboards and Facebook to the game, so that you can conveniently measure CHSV with both familiar people and the whole world.

results

The result was a game. According to reviews of people who managed to test - 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 take the rubble in time. Such a balance was made specifically so that the game was not excessively complex, and the success of the game 1010 (which has a similar balance of difficulty) inspired.

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