#soulpop

One of the main key gameplay features is called chaining, where when you select at least 4 shapes of the same type, you can chain to a different shape type and build up a long chain of multiple shapes. Using chaining to maximum effect ensures you get more mana points to be able to cast spells, another key gameplay element. This really shifts it away from the "match-3" style game that it is derived from, and I hope it provides a fun mechanic for people to enjoy.

So chaining is well in place (as well as comboing and shape activations, which is fun to watch), and now in the last couple days I've even put in a rudimentary spell casting system with about 35+ different spells players can cast to add/enchant shapes to board, remove enchantments or adversarial shapes, or even affect the gameplay (changing the direction of gravity is kind of fun!).

I think there's a really interesting spell casting mechanic as well, which uses a spell book that has 8 slots and you drag your finger across the different slots in a specific order to cast spells. This is going to be fun to animate and add some cool visual pizzazz to it all once I'm at that phase.

Having so many spells (each with their own specific 3-9 point sequence) with this very manual spell casting mechanic seems a bit of a risk. I wanted to add a bit of a challenge to the game, in terms of knowledge and muscle memory that needs to be gained through playing it. I may need to change the spell book so that it works like a book that the player can flick through the different spells to see the spell's instructions to then perform.

One of the (weird) ambitions I have with this game is to have PvP tournaments 😂 Similar to fighting games, I want the versus mode to be for those who have honed their (spell) craft and can maximise their effectiveness through practice and muscle memory. Most of the spells will be better suited for the versus mode as they can add challenges if you're on the receiving end of them.

The other plan is to have 12 different characters a player can pick. Each character will have different strengths/weaknesses that will affect their gameplay (e.g. certain characters will have different magical affinity which will determine what kinds of spells they can cast). There's an idea that when you fulfil certain objectives on the board, a player will get a "boost" which will provide some kind of limited time enhancement to their gameplay. Most likely it will be in the form of a spell that is automatically cast to either help the character or harm the opponent.

I'm also even planning on building a "Saga" mode which is basically a single player mode where you follow each character's story. Each level will represent some kind of step in that character's story (e.g. training, adventuring, a battle with another character, etc.). It's all very fun to think about, but transforming into a cohesive, entertaining and fun interactive game experience (while learning Unity and game dev) is the hard part.

I managed to get some animations in and it was also my first go at understanding the animation system in Unity—surprisingly, it was very easy. Especially considering I used to do a lot of Flash and After Effects. It has same principles of key frame animation and tweening properties.

The Animator component and Animator Controller kind of make sense, but I'm a bit at a loss when I want to create an animation that has some additive elements to it, and not absolute. I guess I'll figure that out later.

So I have a few animations in. Things are wobbling, bobbling, popping, gleaming, and the like. It's giving the game a bit more character, it's also making me more excited about it. I had to retool the structure of my gameobjects and add extra sprites to do some simple things like lightening or darkening the shapes on the board, but it was easy enough.

However the trouble I came to was more with the game logic and managing state.

When a player selects shapes on the board, those shapes need to change their state and run their animations. Easy enough. However after selection, the board needs to run through a sequence to essentially calculate what shapes are moving, eliminated, dropped, and comboed, and potentially run that sequence multiple times (when shapes drop down and form groups of >=3 of the same type, they can be comboed and eliminated).

Because I'm also working in shapes that have an activation phase (i.e. at some point in the game a shape can be activated which can potentially influence/alter other shapes on the board), I wanted to be able to trigger the activation when shapes are swapped, selected, chained, surrounded, eliminated, destroyed, comboed, enchanted, and even before the end of the player's turn, as well as after the player's turn.

So I compounded my woes by having to figure out how to wait for multiple async operations to finish and to perform in an order. I started with Queues and Coroutines, but I had a lot of complexity with board state management.

It was just a real mess. I had to refactor quite a lot of it, and felt a bit exhausted by it. Seeing the animations in action was quite motivating (I also added in some extra particle systems to do explosions and the like) but the jankiness of the state management was causing a lot of issues.

Thankfully perseverance won in the end. I am also using Claude to help me figure out particularly tricky areas—it's been very helpful to unblock me and give me some coding and logic inspiration, especially when I feel I'm not super strong with that.

The thing I note personally with AI-assisted development is that it can show me the basic premises of a solution that I'm trying to solve, but I always need to refactor its work, usually because how I prompted it needed rethinking anyway, as well as I find that its code style changes quite often (there was a difference between Sonnet 4.5 and 4.6), and I like to code too so I often want to kind of take the key points it showed (and helpfully explained) me and riff on them doing something slightly different, usually something more and better than what it gave me.

So finally, I now have a board sequence runner that is triggered after the player's input. It supports all the different steps, as well as any activations that are triggered at any point on those steps.