Mr. Meanie's Beanie Machine
A downloadable game
Threw together a puyo pop / mean bean machine clone just to see if i could get it to work. Thanks for trying it out!
Just a simple "practice mode" with no real goal or concept. If there's enough interest here I might try to polish it up a bit or even add arcade battle mode against the CPU
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Development log
- shapes and jiggle physicsNov 23, 2022
Comments
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I would love a full version, or at least crank controls :)
I'd love to see a full version! It's one of my wife's favorite games.
Same here. I saw a couple other puzzle classics like tetris, puzzle bobble etc and figured we needed a puyo pop.
Programming the enemy AI is gonna be tricky though. All I've ever done was a basic checkers AI way back in college so hopefully that pulls me through somehow.
Everyone hates backseat drivers, but in case it's helpful, I've programmed AI for these types of games before.
In comparison to even checkers, where you have a decently large search space, Puyo is a pretty nice game to build an AI for since you have at most two candidate pieces to evaluate (the current piece and the piece after it) with 22 orientations each, for a total of 484 potential board configurations to evaluate. It makes brute-force scoring the list based on "personality" (e.g. prefers setting up chains, prefers matches, favors certain colors) pretty easy, and then you can have different AIs with seemingly diverse personalities to compete against.
Thats actually kinda what I was thinking about. I feel pretty confident I could brute force min max optimize my way to an incredibly hard game, but it seems like I'll need a computer opponent that seems to stop and think, be indecisive, or have personality quirks like you were saying
I always like to have a random float range for each personality that determines where in the optimized list I select the move from so that you're not consistently at the same "optimum" level for each move.
Then you throw in a 1+line count chance that it selects a bottom 10 move for the "choke" factor.
Anyway, this is a really solid implementation of puyo pop. I really hope you decide to continue with it