Fruiti Blox

About

Fruiti Blox is a puzzle game (yes, another one!). You play on a 10×10 grid full of blocks. The blocks come in one of 4 colours. The object of the game is to capture as large a rectangle of blocks as possible by selecting the four “corner” blocks that make-up the rectangle. The only stipulation is that the corners must all be the same colour.

That description sounds a lot more dry than the game actually is When you capture blocks you gain a piece of fruit. Fruit can be used like a colour block, but using fruit you can unlock one of 30 in-game “Fruit Bonuses”. And bonuses equal big scores! For example capturing a strawberry within a red group unlocks the “Strawberry Fool” bonus.

The Original

Everyone who plays this says they’ve seen a game like it before, but no-one can tell me where While I don’t think for a second this is an original concept, I do think the fruit adds a nice twist to it. For my part I saw a game like this back on the Atari ST, but there was no fruit involved, just the four base colours and a timer.

Development Trivia

This is going to be my final game released in 2008. I feel it also represents the pinnacle of where I’ve come re: AS3 development. It’s my first game ever to actually use Flash properly – by that I mean vector graphics, animations created on the timeline and, heaven forbid, I actually use a MovieClip in this game (none of my games prior to this, except Pumpkin Dash, ever used a MovieClip).

I had the core concept of this game up and running in a matter of hours. But I re-coded the whole game engine twice during development, and modified it quite significantly in the final few days before release to change the way events were handled. Perhaps I’m not alone in this regard – I refactor a lot as a project progresses, but I find my workflow is usually flexible enough to cope with this, and the final games are less buggy and faster as a result.

I also polished this game until it shone like a great big shiny button! Once the gameplay was solid I really went to town on the aesthetics, and I feel it shows.