The Three Game Challenge – Part 3 – The Family Jewels

Well this is it! I have completed the third game in my three game prototype challenge. (first game, second game)

With this one I wanted to try my hand at a very popular game genre at the moment, match-three. Because this is a rather simple style of game I thought it would be really easy and fast to make. Wrong. I spent hours without touching a keyboard trying to come up with some novel twist on the genre.

I toyed around with a gem dropping mechanic but that didn't work so well, then I thought about how someone interacts with match-three games on mobile, by dragging the icons around. So I decided to base my game play on dragging gems around until they make a match.

I originally wanted a "mindless" match-three game like Montezuma, one where you play it as fast as you can without thinking too much about the moves. As I started developing the game play for this one however it seemed to fit a puzzle like game better so that's what I ended up with.

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](/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/screenshot_02.png) 

Anyways give it a go and let me know what you think:

[Play The Family Jewels

](/projects/jewels)

This one took a little less time at the others at 31hours over 7 days, as per the other two I recorded my time spent:

17th April 11:00 - 12:00 15:00-18:00

20th April 10:00-12:00

21st April 13:00-17:00

22nd April 11:00-13:00 14:00-16:00 20:00-21:00

23rd April 11:00-16:00

24th April 11:00-16:00 18:00-21:00

25th April 11:00-12:00

Well that's the end of my challenge! Im surprised I managed to do it. A little over a week per game seems like hardly any time at all but having that time restriction really is good as it helps to limit your scope, preventing the game from ballooning out into something that could otherwise have taken months and still not have been any fun to play.

As for the tools I used. I used Richard Lord's excellent Ash Game Framework to develop them all alongside Starling with Feathers on top of Flash for the rendering. For rapidly prototyping games they have been excellent. Now im more familiar with Ash I may write a post or two about how to go about structuring certain parts of a game in an enitity-component like manner.

But for the next week or so I need to finish my packing before my mammoth trip to Central and South America.