The game consists of several small "tiles" of different colors. It is possible to delete a connected area of tiles of the same color by clicking on them. This makes the tiles within the connected area vanish and gives you points (the larger the area, the more points you get). Tiles above the erased are will drop down. Columns will shift to the left to fill empty columns.
Single tiles with no adjactant tile with the same color can't be deleted. A game ends if all tiles have been deleted, or if there are no connected tiles of the same color.
Before deleting a large area of yellow tiles:
After deleting the large area of yellow tiles:
If you manage to erase all tiles, you can start a new game while keeping the points you earned. We call this "moving to the next level". To start the next level, simply click somewhere on the play field.
The status bar will show you the level you are in (in this example, Level 2), the number of points you earned within this level (in this example, 79 points), and the number of points have earned in total (in this example, 1321 points).
For the curious: if you delete n tiles, you receive n * (n - 1) / 2 points.
Allows you to load a previously saved game. This doesn't restore the Undo history.
Saves the current state of the game. Choosing the extension *.sg is recommended, but not necessairy.
Ends the SameGame Application. A chosen layout and game dimensions are remembered, but your current game will not be saved automatically, and there will be no warning whether you really want to quit.
Undoes the last move. You can undo all moves within the current level.
Undoes all your moves within the current level.
Allows you to set the size of the game, and the number of colors. Changing these values will start a new game (without warning you that your current game will be lost). You can't have fewer than two colors, obviously. The maximum number of colors possible depends on the layout you have chosen.
A list of available layouts. Changing the layout doesn't affect the game itself, it just changes its appereance. It is easy to add more layouts, see chapter Layouts.
Shows the Highscore for the current combination of width, height and number of colors.
Should take you to this very file.
Guess what: it schows an about message.
Additional third-party layouts should come as files in the ZIP-format. Add them by simply placing them in the layout subfolder of your SameGame application. For example, if SameGame is placed in c:\Games\SameGame and you obtained a layout collection called addon.zip, you should place this file in c:\Games\SameGame\layout\addon.zip.
Additional layouts are available after you restart SameGame.
It is quite trivial to make your own layouts, and no programming knowledge is needed. The process is documented on a separate page:
SameGame is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, so you are allowed to modify the game and redistribute the modified version under these terms.
I'm still learning to do GUI programming with wxPython, so some places of the code may look strange or roundabout. You are encouraged to improve them.
Should you choose to change the code, you are encouraged to do it in such a way that old layout definition files keep working. Keeping old saved game states and highscores working seems to be less important to me.
Possible ideas for improvements are:
It should be noted that the highscore files are fairly easy to crack. I see no way to avoid this within an open source game: after all, your code must be able to read and write highscore files, so your code is also able to tweak them.
Currently, I can't think of anything. Maybe this section will grow larger in later versions.
04.05.2006. Some bugfixes, setup for py2exe.
21.02.2006. Not much to tell yet. Features of the game:
My name is Jan Thor, I have a homepage at www.janthor.de and can be reached at jan@janthor.de.