This is really good. :)
Reviews for "Crystals"
Fairly basic Bejeweled clone...it would help if you understood that you can move jewels into gaps, though. I lost a couple score attempts because this is not explained.
turtlesf responds:
Agreed, a tutorial page will be added. It's not exactly fair to throw someone into a timed puzzle game like this without instructions, even though most people have played the genre before.
I think the biggest problem I have with this is that it's not balanced well. The pieces are randomized and advancement becomes more of a game of luck, rather than skill. That isn't to say you don't have a nice concept on the tile swap genre, however, I think these kinds of games are overdone what with the saturation of them on mobile gaming and flash games over the years. In closing, it's certainly not the worst game on here, but it's not great, either.
medals don't work 😥
Not sure if it's a bug or not but it's possible to swap a gem to an empty space in the grid, might have to check that out.
I found it weird in a design sense that it's primarily a very random game but all power-up rewards in the game have a very set circumstance for appearing. Line clear only appears when you match 4, bombs when you match 5 and all the goals of course are all based on matching on specific tiles in the grid. To make the feel of the game more consistent it might be cool to add a chance for power-ups to appear randomly in some form or way. Maybe spawning at the top of the screen, revealing when you break a purple block or having a chance to appear when you match 3.
I just read about the cross-clear in the description now, you have a nice variety in power-ups although they also seem to have the same effect of clearing gems. I remember in an old match-3 game called Collapse that there was a power-up which changed gems on the board to another colour, could be interesting to explore more types of powers.
turtlesf responds:
Not a bug. Moving crystals into blank spaces lets you position them to make matches, destroy the quartz (rock) obstacles, or help move spike ball obstacles downward. Blank spaces should only appear when there is a quartz obstacle blocking crystals from falling.
Matching games have an element of randomness, but this makes the game less fair. A goal for this game was to limit randomness to encourage competition. The color of the gems that fall is not totally random, it is picked from a randomized list, this ensures there is not too many of one color falling down. I like the idea of having powerups fall down if the game was not geared toward competition.
I really like the color switching powerup idea. The color switching one may be overpowered for the size of the board, but I will have to think about it more.