Tumbletris

Story

It was the day before Halloween,

In a factory you have never seen,

With secrets hidden in barrels deep,

Formulae to raise the dead from sleep,

As corpses crawl, moan and grumble,

Both head and room roll and tumble,

Will you survive them forever more,

Or finally earn your coveted score ?

About

Hi there ! It's me, JavaSaurus. I am a hobbyist / indie dev and this edition marks my 10th (consecutive) submission to LD. The theme was, per usual, a very enticing topic. But this time ... It really took all of my limited brainpower to come up with something that I find original and fun. And with Halloween just around the corner, a cute and cuddly zombie game seemed like a great decision. So I did it, solo... I have built TumbleTris, a Match 3 game where the zombies try to get to you by climbing the blocks you stack !

But Java? Where does the theme fit in?

Well ! Unlike in any other match-3 games out there, every 10 seconds the entire board flips. Let gravity do its thing and take out the zombies for scores and bragging rights!

Gameplay

The game is quite easy in its setup. You control the character at the center of the screen and can move left to right. Drop barrels beneath you, matching (at least) 3 of the same type to create a chain reaction that gives you points. You need to drop the barrel before its timer runs out. If not, it will explode in your face, damaging you !

Every 10 seconds, the playfield makes a rotation, dropping any barrel that is not connected by the same type to a wall, adding some spice to your matching !

Meanwhile, a horde of zombies is forming beneath you and they will try their very best to use your stack of barrels to get to you. Once they do, they'll rush you and take one of your lives, so plan your moves carefully...

Oh and... Zombies have HP. That means they won't always instantly die. As the game progresses, you'll find they have a protective aura ! The more red the shield, the more HP the zombies have.

*BEWARE, barrels will bounce off zombies that survive, so try to take them out with matching barrels !*

You will find that I've added buttons for Mobile support. Obviously, this is not really a nice way to play the game on desktop or in a browser.

Action	Keys
Move Left/Right	Left / Right arrow keys
Drop Barrel	Down arrow / A key
Options Menu	B Key

Development

The following tools were used for the creation of TumbleTris' code, assets and (most of the) audio

* Unity 2022.1 and Visual Studio 2022
* Pyxel Edit
* BFXR, BeepBox and Audacity

Dev Remarks

* Rotating the playfield implies I needed a square (at least for easier coding). This however kinda left the sides of the game wide open. I decided to use that space and make buttons, designed for the mobile release. You don't really need these to play on computer, the arrow keys would work (and A/B).

* The highscore system is a make-shift version put together in the last 15 minutes of the jam. The intention was to use an external solution, but I have run out of time. It would be REALLY COOL if you would post a screenshot of your score in the WEB version, I will try to periodically (manually) add them, to see how you did in comparison with other players !

* I am quite proud of how the zombie AI turned out. They are "greedy" not "smart". I intentionally did not go for an A* algorithm, but I am using a floodfill algorithm that finds all blocks that are connected to the bottom side of the playfield, ensuring the zombie's can reach it. Next, they find the highest block of that list. The zombie AI thus has the ability to climb along the sides of the screen, adding an extra dimension to the game !

* In desperate need of 8Bit audio, I looked for inspiration to make music in the "bubble bobble" style. After long hours of trying, beep-boxing, tweeking noise with audacity and going through existing songs... I almost used deeplearning to generated 8 bit music for me instead... In the end, I think the selected songs fit the look and feel pretty well. DO NOTE THAT THE AUDIO SETTINGS MIGHT BE LOW BY DEFAULT, PRESS B TO CHECK

* I want to give special thanks to my good friend PomoTheDog . Saturday night, I pretty much had given up as I ran stuck and had to reduce scope pretty badly. He stepped up and slapped me in the face, telling me that if I would finish ANYTHING I would become a real LD veteran. Pomo ? You rock my friend !

* I would also like to thank my entire twitch community at my twitch channel

Bugfixes and Quality of life updates

* Increased delay between barrels to prevent spamming (Gamebreaking)

* Fixed bug where zombie acceleration was inverted (zombies were slowing down instead of speeding up), completely
destroying the difficulty ramp.

* Removed confusing indicator arrows to show rotation, replaced with the dev-wall-glow (glowing wall = next floor-side)

* Activated (simple) debug trace to show indicator of final block position.
I used the same code before to debug barrels moving off location, it was a minor adjustment but needs to be mentionned.

* Removed "Exit Game" button in options menu for web build

* Added working leaderboard to the offline build (was disabled along the web build)

* Fixed stacking sound if too many zombies spawned

* Fixed multikill bug (barrels were intended to only kill one zombie at a time, explosions kill many)

* Fixed moving while dropping barrels, leading to "corner edgecases"

* Fixed pausing zombies, so they don't land on the platform while switching sides, which is unfair

* Fixed a bug in the floor

* Fixed the difficulty ramping (reducing the number of zombies that hid the playing field)

* Fixed sluggish controls (this was because the controls were waiting for Unity's animation triggers, it did work fine in the normal build)

* Fixed overly loud audio

* Fixed Zombie HP indicator (and barrel bouncing off to damage them)

Want me to play your game?

Just come by when you see me live ! Or leave your game in the comments below !