Colour Chain

About

This game was written for the Shaun the Sheep web site. It was my second ever AS3 game. The objective is to clear the entire grid of blocks by clicking blocks of the same colour. The longer the chain of blocks you can link, the bigger your score! Wildcard blocks (the silvery white ones) will match any colour. If you remove a whole column the grid collapses together to let you carry on. Bombs can be used to destroy 3×3 areas of blocks. Extra bombs can be won if you score high enough.

Pros

• It’s bloody addictive!
• There is no timer, so no “stress” to re-act quickly. You can literally take as long as you like. A friend of mine called it a “pipe and slippers Tetris”!
• It’s small. The final SWF size is 322 KB including all graphics and sound effects.
• It’s fast! Even though I am shifting around large numbers of blocks (especially when you explode an entire column) AS3 copes perfectly.

Cons

• It’s not exactly original
• With more time I’d like to have integrated the highscores display directly into the game itself.
• No music. It has sound effects, but still no music! Maybe my next game will?!

Development Trivia

• It was my first game to use the Flint particle system. I use it directly on the main menu, and again within the game for the bomb sparks trail + exploding blocks.
• This game was a nightmare to debug I was having to dump out the entire grid array structure to check the blocks were falling correctly, sliding over, etc.
• I made good use of TweenLite for the falling blocks and collapsing columns.
• The prototype for this game used multi-coloured Shaun heads instead of blocks!