Denial

This is my latest MiniGame, posted to the compo ~30 hours ago (but updated twice, so ~20 hours since last version). It has not yet appeared on the compo page though. It runs on unexpanded VIC-20.

The game is an implementation of Jewels, the puzzle game. You will swap two jewels in order to get horizontal or vertical rows of three or more, which then will disappear. A jewel may be part of both a horizontal and vertical row at the same time.



You move with the keys U-N-H-J, select jewels with space and Return to restart the game. There is a small bonus for creating cascades, i.e. one removal and scroll down causes another removal etc. You have roughly two minutes to go. Whenever the time is up or there are no more valid moves, the game ends.

http://www.cbm.sfks.se/files/jewels.zip

I'm not sure it is 100% bug free. Sometimes I get the impression that the game accepts a bad move and jewels disappear without being three in a row, but maybe it is me not paying full attention to the board. I can not on purpose reproduce any buggy behavior. The two earlier revisions had more serious bugs which I fixed.

At first, I was planning to use custom graphics and maybe have a splash screen, but there was no room for this. Maybe if I would make it a 4K game, which would leave lots of space for graphics, high score lists, music and fancy stuff that is not really required for the game. Source code may be available upon request after the compo.

Awesome, a new program to play with!

I'm going to upack Vic-20 from moving tonight and test it out.

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I've been trying to play this game on the mega-cart (and in emulation) and I can't get any jewels to swap places.

I select the first jewel by moving the cursor onto it and pressing SPACE. It is highlighted. I then move to an adjacent jewel I want to swap it with and press SPACE again. Nothing happens (the jewels are not swapped) except a sound effect, and all highlighting on the jewels is removed.

What am I doing wrong?

I figured it out.

You CANNOT swap jewels unless the result will be three jewels in a row. This is a little different than other jewel games I have played.

Now, I a quite possibly a little thick, but I don't think this rule is obvious to the first time player. Perhaps it should be mentioned in the accompanying instructions.