I guess this one is for @danking222.
I was trying out Alchematch and I started thinking about having an end goal for it and what it would look like. I think I have an idea that you might consider implementing.
Basically, the game would play as normal until a player move resulted in no match being made (either because there were no possible matches or because the player simply did not see it). At this point the game would somehow display whatever score it was keeping track of.
Good suggestion! We have discussed something like this a few times during development, but could never quite settle on a way to do it, both technically and from a gameplay perspective. Specifically, the way we would establish “no match possible” seemed like a really interesting computer science problem, but not one we were interested in solving at the time.
If you’ve got something in mind, though, please fork the repo and try it out! Honestly, I think there is room for many match-3 styles games on the system, Alchematch is just the first!
So, this is why I suggested a hand-wavy way of dealing with it. You do not need to know how to solve the problem as long as you keep track of pieces being disconnected and reconnected. If after a reconnecting no match is made (which still has some challenges due to the way matches are detected currently), game over. Not this does not necessarily mean that there was no possible match. Just that the player did not see it (which seems fine anyway. The rule would be “must make at least one match on every move”).
I might. But between my actual job, kids and current projects, it will probably be a while until I can get around to doing that. We will see.
After a while, when I was playing alchematch, I started to count all chain reactions and appering bombs as a single point, until nothing happend anymore (without rearanging). I thought that would be a great “goal” if players would have thair highest count after a certain amount of reconnections, or something. But it’s really hard to keep track of the numbers by eye only, as in bigger clusters there can be like 3 reactions and 4 bombs at the same time and the reactions times being completly mixed up. If there was a way for the game to keep track of these points by itself, it would be cool.