Match-3 gameplay

With my development PC running again, it was time to figure out how the game would actually work. Peter made a suggestion early on that digging the whole could be implemented as a match-3 game, and that struck me as a fantastic idea: we populate the hole with blocks, and the player swaps neighboring blocks to form matches of three or more. The gems never refill, so while it’s fairly easy to find a match early on, each match you clear makes it more difficult to find the next one.

I got the basic mechanics working in the morning with some programmer art:

In the afternoon, Donald and I merged his art cart with my code cart and made something that already looks recognizably like a game!