Match-3 Development

Engines, Tools and Languages used:

[PlayCanvas, Javascript, NodeJs]
[Team Projects]
[2023]

At Wanted 5 Games

From 2022-2023 I did an internship at Wanted 5 Games, this was my graduation internship and during my time there I worked on two different match-3 games called Smiley World: Match and Cook & Match: Sara's adventure. These games are both made in a web based engine called PlayCanvas, easy to compare to unity in terms of layout and ease of use, as well as the object based workflow. The engine does not really support object orientated programming using Javascript but it is possible to create something that is similar in ways. Both Games are made on top of the same framework / boilerplate which is created by the talented developers at Wanted 5 Games. With their increasing experience in creating web games they have streamlined the process of creating these games. I was put into the team that was responsible for creating and working these two games.

My Responsibilities

In Smiley World: Match I worked mainly on programming the power-ups found in the game and making sure the ideas of the designers were correctly implemented. This process included a lot of communicating and implementing feedback. Next to that I found myself implementing various animations and art aswell as optimizing the game systems.
In Cook & Match: Sara's Adventure my main tasks were fixing bugs that came out of QA. On top of that I also worked on the screenshake functionality in the game and the dynamic background-image that is visible in the Facebook version of the game.

For both games I helped and assisted in the creating new test builds and gettings the game test or release ready. The developers at Wanted 5 games helped me further improve my Javascript skills and taught me a lot on how webgames are made and what is important during the development of these games.

Thesis Research

While taking part in the development of both games I also did research on how to improve the game feel within these games by exploring the uses of shaders and particle systems in Playcanvas. As the time of writing my thesis and this page Shaders and particle system are not used a lot in the games made by Wanted 5 mainly because these features in Playcanvas are not well documented and not as user friendly as you might find them in other game engines. The results of the research concludes that Wanted 5 Games should definetly start using more particle systems within the games they create as it could increase the game feel the average Match-3 player experiences. The last images on the right is the result of an improved explosion effect from my research.