Introducing: Swivel
Posted by Patrick on Tuesday, January 05, 2010Tue, Jan 05, 2010

This is what I’m working on as I find the time.

The mechanic is simple: rotate groups of four blocks clockwise or counter clockwise to match four or more adjacent blocks.

Bonuses can be generated for matching more than four blocks, rematching (adding a block to a match in progress), combos (matching within moments of the last match), and chains (causing additional matches by a match). Combo and chain multipliers stack — fast fingers mean big score.

Frozen blocks cannot be moved and must be thawed by matching adjacent blocks.

The game will feature three play modes:

  • Single player survival (depicted in the video).
  • Single player "serenity", an endless screen of blocks with no pressure.
  • Multiplayer battle mode based on the survival mode for 4 players over BlueTooth and WiFi.

I wanted my first project to be something simple. Simple enough that it would not overly distract me from fleshing out the framework beneath it, but complex enough that it would drive me to put in useful functionality for future projects.

I tend to do the design and artwork myself, so that consumes quite a bit of time too. As you can see, there is a very warm organic feel to it with a lot of wood.

Swivel is still under development and should be released sometime in 2010.