Devlog #4 - Things I built and then deleted

The clip a little further down this post is from early July. It shows a feature that no longer exists. I built it, recorded it, posted it, and deleted it thirteen days later.

That happens a lot, and it's rarely written about, so this devlog is about three things I built and then took back out.

The match zone highlight

When quads formed a match, the whole zone lit up: a soft aura behind it and an outline around its edge. I built it, tuned it, posted a video of it.

Then I turned it off to compare against something else, and never turned it back on. Weeks later I went to tune it, saw no effect, and found it had been disabled the whole time. I hadn't noticed it was gone.

That's the tell. A feature you forget to re-enable is a feature that wasn't doing anything.

The reason it wasn't is that the board already said it. Matched quads fuse: the gap between them fills with an organic neck so a group reads as one blob rather than as neighbours. That was already the answer to "these belong together". The highlight was a second answer to a question nobody was still asking.

You can see it happening in that July clip, which is the part I find funny in hindsight. The outline and the blob are both on screen, at the same time, saying the same thing. I was watching the one I'd just built.

Two variants died on the way there, both for the same reason. Tinting the ring colours (via bloom, or by recolouring directly) breaks the one rule the visual design can't break: a ring's colour is its identity, and the colour is what you match on. You cannot borrow it to say something else. And a plain white outline sounds safe until two differently coloured groups touch, at which point they share a grid line and fight over it.

The drop preview nobody could see

Before you commit a drop, the landing ghost has to answer two questions. Would this match? And if it does, does it resolve now, or after the sweep line comes back around?

My first version put both on transparency. A dimmed fill over the would-be group meant "this matches". Dimmer and desaturated meant "not until next pass".

It was invisible. Not subtle: invisible.

Two reasons, and the second one is the one I'd tell anyone building a puzzle game.

The first is that both messages were riding the same visual channel. Alpha was carrying "would it match" and "when", so each reading weakened the other and neither survived a glance.

The second is that I was tinting already saturated quads with their own hue. Laying a dim red over a red quad adds nothing, because there was no contrast to add. Hue was already taken. In this game it isn't decoration, it's the whole mechanic, so it is never available for a second job.

What shipped instead uses two channels that were still free. Shape answers "would it match": four corner brackets around the landing cell grow, and when the drop would match they meet and close into a full frame. Motion answers "when": the ghost pulses normally, and freezes if the sweep line has already gone past. A frozen frame means you're building for the next pass.

I also dropped the idea of highlighting the whole would-be group. A pending match already draws its fusion blob, so the preview blob landed on top of a real one and both became unreadable. The preview lives entirely on the cell you're aiming at.

The sound, added and then switched off

In July I added a first audio pass. Each colour maps to a note in a pentatonic scale, which means no combination of events can produce a wrong chord. Cycling plays the colour you're rotating to. Matching plays the colour you matched, climbing an octave on cascades.

I quite like the idea. The build you can play right now has no sound at all.

Only two events are wired, so a turn produces one note or none. That doesn't read as music, it reads as a game with an intermittent bug. Silence is more honest until there's enough of it to be a rhythm, so it's off.

Nothing was deleted. It's two switches, and it comes back when drops, line matches and the end of a sweep have their own voices.

The pattern, if there is one

All three are the same mistake wearing different clothes. Two of them added a second way to say something the game already said. The third asked one thing to say two things at once.

The rule I keep arriving at from different directions is that one visual variable answers one question, and on a board this saturated the list of available variables is shorter than it looks. Colour is spoken for. That leaves shape, motion, and position, and it's worth knowing which of the three you're spending before you start.

The other thing I've learned is duller and more useful: write down why you removed something. Otherwise you rebuild it in three months, hit the same wall, and have no idea you've been there before.

One thing you can answer for me

The drop preview is the piece I'm least sure about. It's meant to be read in the half second before you commit, which is exactly the kind of thing that works for the person who built it and for nobody else.

If you play the current build: do the brackets closing register at all, or do you drop first and find out afterwards? That's in the feedback form, which takes about three minutes.