Old Minigame – Fruitola
Before I launched my first commercial game in Dec 2005, Xmas Bonus, I made a simple match-3 engine using fruit graphics. I was going to make a commercial game called Fruitola, but when I showed it to Indiepath, my first publisher, he suggested making a Christmas version instead. So Fruitola never saw the light of day, until now!
I was programming the very first version on a laptop during the summer when I went on vacation to Cornwall with my family (yes I know I probably shouldn’t have been doing that), and it looked like this:
Soon I put some backgrounds in (photos I had taken) and some fruit graphics from a Blitz forum member (Big10p) and it looked like this:
Then when I changed over to working on a Christmas version, the first incarnation was called Baubled and looked like this:
It was crappy because all the baubles are the same shape, just different colours. That changed for the final version of Xmas Bonus:
And Xmas Bonus eventually evolved into Holiday Bonus a year later. I may still have another Christmas match-3 in me too, we’ll see…
Anyway, you can download and try out Fruitola here (3.75Mb .zip file, PC only).
Don’t expect it to hold up to modern casual game scrutiny though, it’s over 5 years old and wasn’t a commercial product.
February 6th, 2011 at 4:33 pm
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jake Birkett, Leroy Frederick. Leroy Frederick said: RT @greyalien: Check out my 5 year old minigame โ Fruitola http://bit.ly/erKGze (new blog post) […]
April 14th, 2011 at 3:48 am
We’ve same obsession over match-3 games. ๐
April 14th, 2011 at 3:50 am
Well for me this is where it all started then almost 6 years later I release my 6th match-3 ๐
April 22nd, 2011 at 12:41 pm
The original version reminds me of a game I used to play on Uproar, back when it was still hosting it’s own games. As much as 8-12 years ago, I guess.