Didgery is a game I have been working on for quite some time now. It’s the game I started right after I put Nut Harvest 360 on hold. I’ve put a lot of effort and design into the thing, and, personally, I think it shows. It’s a card/puzzler game slated for release sometime in August for the Xbox 360. It was coded using C# and Microsoft’s excellent XNA framework.

I think Didgery is the last puzzle game I make in a while… I used to think that puzzle games would be the easiest things to make… You know, how hard could they be? You don’t necessarily need parallaxing layers, or physics, or tile maps, or editors or any of that fun. I now humbly completely disagree with my former self. Puzzlers have their own nightmarish little nuances. They are tied so heavily to logic and rules that programming it can become a nightmare if you aren’t careful. And bugs…ohhh, the bugs… That’s the worst part. I’ve had bugs in platforming games I’ve made and such, but they are relatively easy to spot, and generally not too hard to fix. The same thing can’t necessarily be said about puzzle games. The logic is tied so closely together that pulling one string to fix a bug may inadvertently cause the whole system to trip over itself in ways you couldn’t possibly comprehend.

I know why Bejeweled Twist took four years to make now…and that developed by PopCap, the king of all things puzzle.

Oh well, it’s almost over now. I’m on the downward slope of adding in bits and pieces and hunting down bugs.

Here is Didgery’s website. Have fun!