05 Dec

Next game: Nocturnarya

We’re currently focused on our next Match 3 game, entitled Nocturnarya. At the time of this writing, the vampiric story is fully completed and all the new code for level design is already tested. Regarding the gameplay, our goal with Nocturnarya is to include a few levels with a bit of screen scrolling, and also a new type of path on the boards. And some Match 3 puzzles, of course.

According to our plans, the game should be completed by Q2 2023. Hopefully. For the time being, here’s the logo and Raphaela’s guidance.

Nocturnarya’s Logo
Raphaela

The kingdom of Nocturnarya has been done in by the human troops. Follow Raphaela or perish!

21 Sep

Coming Soon: Spooky Dwellers

Spooky Dwellers

Update: Here’s a guide for Spooky Dwellers, comprising levels from both the Standard and the Collector’s Edition.

After several months of hard work, our new Match 3 game is complete. The name of the game is Spooky Dwellers and it features a cool and fun mechanic. Essentially, on most of the Spooky Dwellers boards there are ghosts on the edges (the dwellers), and there are also sacred talismans that emit a light to repel those ghosts. Your goal is to destroy obstacles on the board and direct the light towards the ghosts. Of course, there are also several mini-games, such as hidden objects.

Furthermore, the game will have 2 versions: Standard, and Collector’s Edition (which includes 60 bonus levels, more mini-games and many other features). These versions will be available for Windows and, hopefully, macOS (still a work in progress).
The game should be available for sale next month. We hope you like it 🙂

09 Apr

Coming up: Suddenly Meow 3

After helping the fairies in Suddenly Meow 2, Tim is gearing up for a new adventure. If everything goes well, we should have a beta of Suddenly Meow 3 by the end of this month, looking forward to a May release. In this new version we’ll be adding more usability features and further Match 3 challenges! 90 new levels with plenty of Match 3 puzzles! You’ll have to put your thinking cap on!

Suddenly Meow 3 Teaser
Spooky and Tim
02 Aug

Suddenly Meow and what’s next

We have spent over half a year completing a new Match 3 engine and a game using that engine. Our new game is Suddenly Meow, a Match 3 with puzzle elements, so you’re going to need your thinking hat! Suddenly Meow consists of 90 levels with progressive difficulty, varied challenges and Match 3 battles. In addition, for the first time we include in one of our games the possibility to choose between Relaxed, Timed and Limited Moves modes. Suddenly Meow is a step forward in terms of the direction we want our future games to take.

Suddenly Meow
Level 89 of Suddenly Meow

And today we have just completed the localization of Suddenly Meow into 6 additional languages (French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch). We have been really busy, and without further ado we are already in the early stages of our next Match 3. At the moment, we don’t have a new DragonScales in mind, but maybe in 2022 we might find the opportunity to develop DragonScales 8 (we already have some ideas and part of the story). So our next project will also be a Match 3 in the conventional sense, and we will use the engine we developed for Suddenly Meow, incorporating some extensions and optimizations.

We hope you like Suddenly Meow!

12 Mar

DOTween: How to append a tween to a sequence already playing?

I’m using the fantastic DOTween engine for creating and managing tweens on Unity, but the latest version cannot handle a specific case: how to append a tween to a sequence which is already playing? First a bit of background. After completing DragonScales 6, we’re focusing on a new game, a casual Match 3 with a traditional tile swapping gameplay. Our DragonScales games are created with Java and LibGDX. However, this new project will be built on Unity with C#, and we make intensive use of tweens.

In particular, we want the players to be able to keep playing and swapping tiles even if the game is simultaneously processing matches in other areas of the board. When a match is detected, tiles above those matched tiles will fall. We’re implementing this falling path with position tweens, via DOTween. However, new matches in other areas might alter the path of tiles which are already falling. In order to handle such cases we’ll be appending new tweens to the tweens which are already executing. The problem is that sequences in the current version of DOTween must be entirelly defined beforehand, which clearly does not suit our requirements.

Luckily, there’s a sound workaround published by user EvgenL in this pertinent and open DOTween issue. In short: use a queue of sequences. Here’s the class we’re using, completely based on the referred code:

public class TweenChain
{
    public Queue<Sequence> SequenceQueue = new Queue<Sequence>();

    public TweenChain()
    {
        // empty
    }

    public void AddAndPlay(Tween tween)
    {
        // Create a paused DOTween sequence to "wrap" our tween
        var sequence = DG.Tweening.DOTween.Sequence();
        sequence.Pause();
        // "Wrap" the tween
        sequence.Append(tween);
        // Add tween to queue
        SequenceQueue.Enqueue(sequence);
        // If this is the only tween in queue, play it immediately
        if (SequenceQueue.Count == 1)
        {
            SequenceQueue.Peek().Play();
        }
        // When the tween finishes, we'll evaluate the queue
        sequence.OnComplete(OnComplete);
    }

    private void OnComplete()
    {
        // Tween completed. Remove it.
        SequenceQueue.Dequeue();

        // Other tweens awaiting?
        if (SequenceQueue.Count > 0)
        {
            // Play next tween in queue
            SequenceQueue.Peek().Play();
        }
    }

    public bool IsRunning()
    {
        // Are tweens being processed?
        return (SequenceQueue.Count() > 0);
    }

    public void Destroy()
    {
        // Goodbye. Thanks for your hard work.
        foreach (var sequence in SequenceQueue)
        {
            sequence.Kill();
        }
        SequenceQueue.Clear();
    }
}

Hopefully future versions of DOTween will handle this use case in a straightforward fashion. We needed to append a tween to a sequence in execution and, for the time being, this class solves our requirement.

20 Nov

DragonScales 5: The Frozen Tomb clinches the top spot on iWin

Good news! Our newest game DragonScales 5: The Frozen Tomb has reached #1 entry on casual game portal iWin.com. Yet more, DragonScales 5 clinched the top spot for all its 3 categories:

  • Match 3
  • Puzzle
  • Brain/Logic

We know new and fantastic games are released every day, and these “top spots” are temporal things, but today we’ll enjoy our little victory. Thank you very much to all of you who made this possible!

02 May

DragonScales 3’s page is now active!

Hello everybody! The web page for our new game DragonScales 3: Eternal Prophecy of Darkness is already live! You can read a description of the game including its features, take a look at a few screenshots and the trailer, and of course, purchase the game. For the time being, DragonScales 3: Eternal Prophecy of Darkness is available for Windows and Mac. Here’s the link to the game’s new site: DragonScales 3: Eternal Prophecy of Darkness. We hope you like it!

14 Jul

DragonScales Deluxe available in 6 languages!

DragonScales Deluxe Multilanguage Localized
Great news! Our game DragonScales: Chambers of The Dragon Whisperer has been localized into 6 languages (German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese) thanks to the great work of GameHouse’s localization team. They’ve carried out a fantastic translation, which included localization of textual and non-textual elements of the game. All of this started a few months ago, with the adapting of a special DragonScales build suitable for localization. After weeks of hard work, we’re very excited to bring our original gameplay to a broader audience. As of today, the game is available on zylom.com:

A huge thank you to all of you who sent emails and were on the lookout for fresh news of DragonScales and our new projects. Thank you!

P.S. Stay tuned for news and updates on our next project: DragonScales 2! A new challenge lies ahead! More levels, new game modes, more fun!