Day 1

Hey all! Decided to do a devlog for this project to help me organize all my scatterbrained thoughts and hopefully it can be educational and inspirational to other aspiring game developers out there.

So, I'm making a Money Idol Exchanger/magical drop clone. Why? Because I love the game and it seems a reasonably sized project to get my feet back into the world of game design. I've worked on several projects in the past, but most became too much and I quickly got overwhelmed and gave up. So, I'm looking to work on some smaller projects to get better experience designing games before moving on to any big projects. What better game to start with than Money Idol Exchanger? 

Wait...You've never heard of or played it? Well, it's basically a puzzle game where you are moving around coins of various denominations to "exchange" them into higher denominations (i.e. five 1's -> one 5). Sounds great right?! Yeah, well...It's very fun and addicting...Much more than any tagline could make it sound. Go check it out yourself if you don't believe me!

Okay so...Yeah...Let's get started making this thing!

DAY 1
First thing I did when tackling this new project is to put words behind my ideas, rather than jumping into coding as I often do.

So I wrote out a tentative title, a brief description of what I'm trying to accomplish. Then I list out some if the primary and secondary functions that I need to create. This builds a checklist any let's me track progress.

Title: Money Mang.....Dollar Dudes....Totally Not A Money Puzzle Exchanger Clone.....Magic Moola Masters

Description: Move and exchange money to give your friends are harder time moving and exchanging their money! It's a competitive puzzle game BOI!

Primary Functions (Core gameplay mechanics - Wouldn't be Money Exchanger without it)
+Move selector
+Randomize initial game board
+Push new line
+Destroy piece
+Pick up pieces (including stack)
+Drop pieces/stack
+Clear down pieces
+Combo clear

Secondary Functions (Gameplay enhancers!)
+Score tally
+Special abilities
+Player 2 game board
+Send attack lines

After that I threw together some makeshift temporary sprites and got to work! Not concerned with graphics at this point. Everything is placeholder. Sizing is important though!

High-def graphics in tow, I took to the event editor! Got the player 'selector' sprite moving with a variable denoting which column it's in (and limiting it's movement). Then worked on getting the gameboard initialized and randomized. Created a 7x50x2 array to represent and maintain the gameboard data (each cell in the array representing a 'coin'). 7 for the width of the playfield. 50 for the height of the playfield limit (I don't expect columns to get larger than this without game over'ing). The 2 depth for the players - 1 & 2. 

Each cell in the array represents the value of the coin in the slot (if not empty):
0 = empty
1 = 1
2 = 5
3 = 10
4 = 50
5 = 100
6 = 500

Within a few minutes I had player movement and a randomized game board! Now to get these coins moving...

I created several functions to help me streamline the process - GetCoinValue, GetBottomCoinRow, DeleteCoin, PullCoins, PushCoins. I'll add screenshots later maybe. In short, this went WAY smoother than I thought. About an hour and a half in, I had moving coins! The way Money Exchanger works is you can pick up any coin (or stack of coins with the same value) and you can continue to pick up as many of this coin as you like. Then you can drop the ENTIRE STACK you're holding in any position. This all works flawlessly now! All done with arrays. All functions pass the PLAYER parameter so they can be used for multiple gameboards/players seemlessly.

At the end if the day I got the basic player control done. Now for the game to return feedback... Clearing down pieces and presenting new lines. Should be fun! I have a few ideas on how to accomplish this...

Here's a picture of what the game looks like after Day 1: