Cat Knight

Cat Knight is a match 3 puzzle game made in unity over the period of 1 month. It consists of 7 unique puzzle blocks which can be linked to beat ever harder levels.
The goal in Cat Knight is to combine multiple puzzle blocks to defeat stronger enemies, the longer the chains the more damage you do to them and this is incentivized through the use of a multiplier displayed to the player.

As this game is very luck dependent, I designed and implemented 3 unique mechanics to ensure that the game is never soft-locked.

The first of these mechanics is a very common one among match 3 games and that is a hint system. When the player has waited for a certain amount of time without making a move the game will search for matching colours to clear the board, these will then be highlighted for the player using a particle effect.

The second mechanic is something that is very rarely seen by the player as it depends on what gems are dropped, and that mechanic is a re-shuffle of the board. This mechanic was added in smaller levels I found that it became increasingly likely that the board would come to a standstill with no moves being possible, as such, the board clears itself and a new set of gems is dropped from the spawn points.

The last unique mechanic used to prevent soft locks is enemy based gem spawning. When an enemy is on the screen, it increases the chance of subsequently spawned gems being the same colour as it.

Unfortunately, because I wanted to complete this game in just about 1 month, and I wanted the game to have at least some level of polish there were many ideas that I had to exclude including; Health gems, which would add more health to the player, allowing them to continue the level for longer. A ‘knapsack’ that could hold 1 gem at a time, and allow the player to swap gems once per turn. A locked gem, which would not move or interact with other gems until unlocked by clearing the gem right above it etc. 

The two most challenging parts of making this game were 1. Level balancing, and 2. bug testing. 

Level balancing was particularly difficult as the spawning of gems is largely random. 
To combat this, I tested each level 5 times for two reasons. firstly, to make sure that it is more challenging than the previous level; with difficulty dipping slightly every 4th level. 
The goal is to keep you in a state of flow. 

Secondly, I wanted to make sure that it was possible to, through good decision making, reach gold on every level.

But the hardest part of making this game was bug testing, and unfortunately, it is a never-ending process as the few bugs which can still be found in the game until now, are difficult to replicate, and are possibly dependant on the speed of the machine that is running the game. 

Overall, I am very satisfied with this game as it was an interesting project and I got to work even more closely with level design than I usually do. 
If I were to redo the game, I would likely try a different approach to the match 3 programming as it seems to have performance issues, and possibly replace the firework mechanic with something that is slightly more satisfying to use.