CardMatch 3D - "AAA" title of card matching games (Froox Archive #1)

Hello everyone!

First, I owe all of you a huge thanks for your support. Your kindness and generosity has given me a chance to get on my feet and gain some much needed independence and stability through tough times. And while I can’t go much into detail on what’s been going on and what I have been planning yet, I just wanted to say thank you. Your support and kind words have helped more than you can imagine.

As promised though, in the meanwhile I can dig up some of my old projects to share with you. While they’re not up to par with my latest work, I hope that you’ll still find those a bit interesting and fun.

The first pick is a game I called “CardMatch 3D”, one of the last games I made in 2013 before starting to fully focus on VR. It has been designed as a primarily mobile game, as part of my attempts to get into the mobile game market, but I never quite got there.

My goal with this title was to create a sort of “AAA title of card matching games”, a tongue-in-cheek description which pretty much means that I tried to put more effort and engineering into this than in your typical card matching game.

Original trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8Xj_MvEZPg 

Notably, you can play against an AI opponent that’s designed to simulate a human - it has a memory model, which degrades over time - it actually remembers and forgets the cards that it sees. Seeing the same card multiple times will help strengthen the memory so it degrades slower. The goal was to make it feel like you’re playing against another human, with adjustable difficulty (0 being a goldfish and 100 a perfect memory).

The game also contains a number of power ups and power downs that can spice up the gameplay. Power downs have a noticeable chance to appear on the right card, so you have to decide if to take the card with risk of punishment or let your opponent try the same card risk-free in the next turn. Conversely power ups will almost never appear on the correct card.

The power ups and power downs can mixup the games quite a bit, during testing with online multiplayer a while back, we had some games where one person was winning, but a power up/down (depending on who’s winning) “More Cards” added more cards to the mix and tipped the scales, making another person win, only to swing the scale back later, leading to a very tense, but entertaining game.

Among those, it also offers multiple game mods and completely customizable rules - for example you can determine how many matching pairs of a given card are here. This lets you create some interesting games. One of my favorites is mode “First Takes All”, where there’s only two unique cards, but about a dozen of each - the first person to find them all literally wins the game.

And last, the game also features 4 different themes: Tropical, Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Simple. The first three were all based on some of my favorite things - fruits (self explanatory), minerals (I used to collect these as a kid) and space (I love learning about space + NASA images are public domain). Each one had a soundtrack (and sound effects) composed by Ondrej “Sakabi” Pultar: a music composer I was working with at the time.

I used to sell the version with all 4 themes on Google Play, but it barely brought any funding back then. I managed to get some change as part of some Indie Bundles, where the game sold together with a number of other indie titles.

While the game isn’t anything groundbreaking, it still holds a special place for me. I was particularly proud of the AI with the memory model - in a few experiments I did back then, people were not able to tell if they’re playing against AI or human players. Not any rigorous study by any means, but it still made me happy.

There were a few other tidbits as well, like the card flipping animation. It’s completely procedural and randomized, so the card flips differently every time. I remember that it took me about 3 days of fiddling around with the curl angles, timing and everything before I was fully happy with the animation.

Early test of the flipping animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0lw2Hj5lxc

Also as another piece of history, this game was actually based on an even earlier card matching game I made in GameMaker, with a similar, but simpler AI memory model: “Pexeso 3D”. It was one of my earliest 3D games (and also using my first experiments with Blender as images for the cards), but unfortunately I don’t remember much about this one, other than that I wanted to remake it for a long time, which eventually resulted in CardMatch 3D.

Pexeso 3D - precursor to this game:https://youtu.be/g8PYsYQNvlY?t=609

Anyway, that’s all for this little dive into the past! You can download the Windows, OS X, Linux and Android versions down below. I could try including the iOS version as well, but since that requires going through the Apple Store process, I’d only do that if there’s sufficient interest (though I could put it up back on Google Play too if there’s interest in that).

The versions were recompiled with a new version of Unity and some old API’s (like Google Play and Ads for Android version) were stripped out. All 4 themes are now included by default with the game and the online gameplay works as well (even across platforms). Shout out to RaithSphere who setup the new servers, since Unity one no longer hosts theirs.

If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments, I’m always happy to answer! And if you’d like to arrange any online matches, feel free!

If you’d guys also be interested, I could add an additional theme into the game, featuring you! Or more specifically, images that you’d like to supply. If you’re interested in this, please leave a comment below.