SSMP!

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Overview

A Jewel Quest version of Super Bounce Out with a dash of Qbert. Take the falling mechanics and board layout similar to Super Bounce Out. Add in level design and end-of-level design mechanics similar to Jewel Quest. Add in board spaces that must be "painted" more than once as in Qbert in order to be considered fully "painted".

Inspiration

Board layout of Super Bounce Out.

Level design and concept of painting the board of Jewel Quest

Painting multiple times on same grid space

Theme ideas

Just throwing out crazy, random ideas to spark other less crazy, random ideas...

• Donuts
• Balls
• Balls with faces
• Sun/clouds
• Bees
• Parasites
• Bubbles
• Fish in bubbles
• Hats
• Baseball/football/soccer
• Monsters
• Sea shells
• Keys
• Flowers
• Cars
• Planets
• Clocks
• Candles
• Jars
• Vegetables/Fruit
• Cats
• Mice with hats
• Cookies
• Emoticons - I really like this idea
• Water balloons

Design

These are likely set-in-stone design concepts

• Pieces fill up a grid (called a well)
• You swap two adjacent pieces to create a chain of three or more identically-colored pieces, that are then removed from play, causing more pieces to fill the well
• You can have cascading collapses of chains as a result of falling pieces after a play
• When you pop a chain in the well, you essentially paint the well on those locations with a color.
• Some locations in the well need to be painted two or more times in order to be considered fully painted
• You need to paint all of the well before you have completed a level
• You are racing a timer to finish the level
• Once you have finished a level, you can replay it at any time. You cannot proceed to the next level until you have completed the current level
• Blocker piece will have two or three colors and will need to be fully popped before the space they occupy in the well is considered fully painted. You must first match the outer color, then once you've done that the outer color becomes whatever was the inner color (in the case of 2-color piece). If this was a 3-color piece, once it is popped once, it becomes a 2-color piece. These pieces do not fall at all.

TODO

Some Todo's...

DaveM:

• Put latest version of TGB in subversion and set up an account for DaveS.

DaveS:

• Learn TGB. Let's start with a Super Bounce Out style well for now. Fire up the level editor and put together a level and save it off. Have the game load it up and fill the well with randomly colored pieces. Let's say we use five colors to start with.
• Once we have our level loading, add in the concept of a valid play where you swap two adjacent pieces and pop a chain. Then add in the concept of pieces falling down. I wouldn't worry yet about actually putting in physics to make the pieces fall down at this point, just fill in the well following the falling rules in SBO.

The storm

A place to just write down random thoughts...

• Piece that is two spaces in size and cannot be moved - does not fall
• Piece that paints more than once on a single space when popped - falls
• Piece that paints more than one space when popped - falls
• Piece that is one space in size and cannot be moved - does not fall
• Oubliette - this is a space that must have a specific type of piece dropped into it in order for it to be considered fully painted
• Chute/ladder - this would be on the board (well design) and it allows us to design wells where columns can be skewed.

• Well design similar to Zuma where we have columns where pieces fall not be as simple as Jewel Quest. In terms of moving pieces and popping, we simply look at the hexagonally-based grid, but in terms of where pieces fall they would follow the channels/columns we have created for the well.
• Reverse gravity piece that will reverse what direction pieces fall from. This would allow us to place Blocker pieces at the top of columns in wells, essentially blocking that column from pieces falling down. The player would in that case try to pop a Reverse gravity piece as part of a chain, and now pieces will fall up, allowing the player to remove the Blockers.
• Time-based pieces would be interesting. They show up in the well and go away if not used within a certain timeframe.
• Yin-yang piece is essentially a 2-color wildcard piece.
• Teleporter well spaces, similar to a chute. This allows us to design wells with portions of the well separate from the main well.
• Bad guy pieces that are matched like any other piece (3 or more), but they unpaint the well beneath them when popped.
• Grayscale piece - You pop it and the world goes gray for a period of time or number of moves - making it harder to play.
• Allow player to earn special pieces that allow them to score better and finish quicker. I had in mind a tube that is being filled up as you scored, and on it there are tick marks. As you fill up the tube and hit a tick mark, you get a new special piece on the playing field. Filling up the tube is not purely based on number of points, but instead on smart play concepts (making a play that causes three chains to collapse at once, for example).
• Pieces that paint the well in interesting ways. One might be a paintball piece that when popped as part of a chain it paints all pieces around it. A second might be a star piece that when popped it actually causes all pieces along each axes from that piece (as the origin) to turn to the color of the origin piece and pop as part of the chain.