A Game I Could No Longer Find

That evening I was thinking about what game to make next.

I suppose every father thinks the same way: ideally the child has fun and still gets something out of it. As I turned it over, what surfaced was a matching game I had played many years ago, the one that used Pokemon artwork.

It had seven stages, each playing by different rules. After you cleared a pair, the remaining tiles would fall, rise, or split to both sides. I was hooked back then, hands and head working together, and I cleared it more times than I can count. What impressed me most was that the author thought to bring gravity into a matching game. It is a little like Super Mario Galaxy: take something everyone already knows, change the direction of gravity, and the whole thing comes alive.

I went online to see whether the game was still out there.

It was gone.

On forums people were still asking where to download it, with no replies underneath. Discussion of the falling rules was scattered and incomplete; nobody had ever written down all seven stages.

If I could not find it, I would make one myself.

I know matching games are everywhere. Search the store and there are hundreds, and there are even more on the web. What I made is not something new.

But the only one I actually wanted to play was that original.

The Hardest Stage Turned Out to Be the First, Not the Seventh

I only worked this out after building it. Back when I was playing, I just felt stuck.

On stage one, nothing moves after you clear a pair. It sounds like the simplest one: no changes to deal with. In practice it is the hardest.

Once there are a lot of tiles, the pairs you can connect are only the ones you had at the start. Clear a few and the rest stay exactly where they were, leaving the board full of holes. You can sweep your eyes over it several times and still not be sure what is connectable.

The gravity on the other stages is actually helping you. It fills those holes back in, and at the same time it creates more chances.

Stage Seven Is Hard in a Different Way

On stage seven everything closes toward the centre. The problem is not that pairs are unreachable. It is that you run out of shuffles.

The game gives you three shuffles. On other stages you rarely use them all. On stage seven you almost always do. The tiles pack into a lump in the middle, matches run out fast, so you shuffle. You clear a few more pairs, they pack in again, and you are stuck again.

In the end you do not lose to the clock. You lose because the shuffles are gone.

What Should the Pictures Be?

The original used Pokemon, so that was off the table for me.

While I was chewing on the problem I looked down at my phone keyboard and realised the answer had been there all along: emoji. Hundreds of them, already sitting on every phone. No drawing, no artist to hire. The more I thought about it the better it got.

The Background Felt Empty

The board was working, but everything around it was flat black and dull. So I went digging through my memory again: how had the original handled its background?

Then it came back. It took a few of the tile pictures, blew them up, and laid them faintly behind the board.

Good idea. I did the same.

That step was not purely decorative. If you played that game too, the background might look faintly familiar to you, even though I cannot be certain my memory of it is right.