Uploaded April 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
A new GC game in 2024??? Believe me, I'm just as surprised to say that... Recently the app got a sudden update that added a pretty substantial amount of new content, including two new genres in the form of Tetris and Bejeweled-like puzzle games. Given that this is the first time since 2015 that anything on this scale has been added, I though it would be a fun time to revisit the app and mess around with the new features.
As I was doing so, I thought it would be funny to do a Lumberjump reskin of the 3-in-a-row genre of which the result can be seen. The artstyle of Lumberjump translates pretty well over to GC, which should not come as a surprise considering it sort of originated there. Importing sprites has been made noticeably more inconvenient with recent updates, but now that all art is in it resembles its source material quite well.
The gameplay is admittedly not very good however. From a design perspective this particular genres has very few options for customization in GC, which partially comes down to how much randomness is involved. This creates some issues, mostly because this randomness can very easily make levels impossible to beat if it decides to not generate any items close enough to be matched.
As a result, beating this game is moreso a matter of luck than skill and due to the limited amount of customization options aside from graphics there isn't really a solution for this. That being said, I enjoyed messing around in this app again after a long time, and it is quite interesting to reflect back on it now that I'm progressing towards being a professional game designer. In a way, it started here with this app...
A new GC game in 2024??? Believe me, I'm just as surprised to say that... Recently the app got a sudden update that added a pretty substantial amount of new content, including two new genres in the form of Tetris and Bejeweled-like puzzle games. Given that this is the first time since 2015 that anything on this scale has been added, I though it would be a fun time to revisit the app and mess around with the new features.
As I was doing so, I thought it would be funny to do a Lumberjump reskin of the 3-in-a-row genre of which the result can be seen. The artstyle of Lumberjump translates pretty well over to GC, which should not come as a surprise considering it sort of originated there. Importing sprites has been made noticeably more inconvenient with recent updates, but now that all art is in it resembles its source material quite well.
The gameplay is admittedly not very good however. From a design perspective this particular genres has very few options for customization in GC, which partially comes down to how much randomness is involved. This creates some issues, mostly because this randomness can very easily make levels impossible to beat if it decides to not generate any items close enough to be matched.
As a result, beating this game is moreso a matter of luck than skill and due to the limited amount of customization options aside from graphics there isn't really a solution for this. That being said, I enjoyed messing around in this app again after a long time, and it is quite interesting to reflect back on it now that I'm progressing towards being a professional game designer. In a way, it started here with this app...
