Beluki / dir

A simple, minimalistic puzzle game.

About

dir is a small, elegant puzzle game written in Lua, using the excellent Love2D framework. I wrote it as a birthday gift for a friend.

It's also my attempt at designing a game that appeals to both casual and hardcore audiences, without relying on quick reflexes or time limits.

Here are two screenshots:

And a feature list:

• Original mechanics that still feel familiar to match-3 game players.

• Highly replayable. Each game usually lasts between 5 and 15 minutes.

• Easy to play, hard to master gameplay, with finely tuned scoring and ranking systems. Can you get the grandmaster rank?

• All the graphics are vector-based and the game is resolution-independent. It looks great on a tiny handheld screen and on a 4k screen, without scaling or stretching pixels. It also adapts itself to almost any aspect ratio. Both windowed (resizable) and full screen modes are supported. Switching between both is instant.

• Three color themes.

Installation

For Linux and Mac systems:

• Install Love2D 0.9.2 using your package manager.

• Download the latest dir.love release from the Releases tab.

• Run love dir.love.

On Windows:

• Download the latest binaries from the Releases tab. There are both x86 and x86-64 binaries available. Those include everything needed to play.

• Extract and run dir.exe.

System requirements are very low. It should run without problems on any computer with OpenGL support. Even the integrated graphics card on my laptop (Intel 965 Express) runs it at 90+ FPS (full screen), using 32 mb of ram and 5% CPU.

The game is portable. It does not read or write to files outside it's folder or to the Windows registry. To uninstall, just delete the folder.

How to play

As you can see from the screenshots above, the game takes place on a 5x5 grid which contains tiles of different colors.

• Use the mouse to move a tile in any of the four cardinal directions. The mouse buttons move left or right while the mousewheel moves up or down.

• When the tile stops, any adyacent tile of the same color will count as a match. All the matching tiles will grow, the combo score increase and you can move again.

• The first move that doesn't match any tiles will cause all the previously matched tiles to disappear, grant the current combo score and add new tiles to the grid in random positions.

You lose when the grid is completely filled with tiles.

The game is infinite (in the same sense as Tetris is). The goal is to make a score as high as possible and, eventually, to reach the grandmaster rank.

As with all puzzle games, the game may seem very hard at first. Don't worry, you'll likely develop new strategies as you play.

Keyboard shortcuts

Although dir is mouse-centric, there are some keyboard shortcuts available:

Key	Use
ESC	Close the game.

R      | Restart.
F      | Toggle between full screen and windowed.

1, 2, 3 | Change the color theme to the first, second and third one. T | Cycle to the next color theme.

Status

This program is finished!

dir is feature-complete and has no known bugs. Unless issues are reported I plan no further development on it other than maintenance.

License

Like all my hobby projects, this is Free Software. See the Documentation folder for more information. No warranty though.