Game#10 : Match 3

This is a learning exercise, not an actual efficiency exercise. The picture of a Match 3 game just screams "2 Dimensional Array", but I have decided in a moment of advanced masochism to do it without arrays.

So I had some fun with this. The bright idea worked well - you can see the outline of the game, but the faded purple blocks and arrows are seeders and blockers for the pieces - this is implementing the 'falling down' bit, with the arrows pushing the out and the squares stopping them. These have had their invisibility setting code disabled so you can see them, obviously this won't show in the end bit. I also use a faint pink square on the screen which is the 'board space' and everything resizes to fit in that space (you can see a faint pink behind the arrows in the middle)

I originally did this with Physics, but I wasn't happy with that, then I did it with bullets, and I couldn't get it quite right. The movement is now hard coded (basic physics stuff) and it finally works, though I had some fun with spurious collisions and it took twice as long as I thought.

I'm going to think Frogger with this - that had some code which scanned looking for lines of log bits, and that can be tweaked to check for lines of food.

The little square box in the top right does say 555 (this is a technical joke), it's job is maintenance of semi globals, which belong to the Layout but aren't real globals - things like the position of the grid and so on. I just think that is neater than bazillions of globals.