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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 6th, 2011 at 7:17 am and is filed under Minigames. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.