Panel Pop: Swapple Wars

Gameplay Summary
This is a challenging action-puzzle- and puzzle-fighting-game on 6×12 tiles, where you move around a cursor which swaps the place of the two panels covered by it. When three or more come together in same column or row, they will vanish and what's above them falls down. Vanishing more than three is considered a combo, vanishing stuff again after panels fall down without the playfield going back to idle is a chain. Roll-up the playfield to add more rows of panels, but don't go up too fast or you will lose.


Garbage Blocks
In garbage-modes, combos and chains will produce big blocks that can be destroyed by making them get in touch with vanishing panels. Every tile occupied by this garbage will transform into a random new panel.


Basic Game Modes
Modes for quickly enjoying short and nice sessions, in a wide variety of ways to play.

ScoreAttack	Increase your score until the game gets too hard and you reach the playfield's top for too long.
Garbage	Survive against the garbage-blocks of your own combos and chains.
TimeScore	Beat your best score in a time-limit.
TimeRows	Roll-up the playfield as much as possible in a time-limit.
FinishLine	Roll-up the playfield until all panels are below the finish-line.

Battle Game Modes
Competitive modes to play with up to four players or literally stupid bots.

TimeScore	Playtime is limited, beat your opponent's score to win.
TimeRows	Roll-up the playfield further than your opponent until timer runs out.
Garbage	A player wins when the other one reaches playfield's top for too long. Combos and chains throw garbage.
Energy	A player wins when the other one's energy, dropping by combos and chains, goes down to 0.
LineRace	Reach the finish-line faster than your opponent.

Puzzle Game Modes
Very different from the rest of the game. The playfield can't roll-up and your actions are limited. Use a very low number of panel-swaps available to vanish everything of the prebuilt constructions, or create and test your own levels for it.


Arcade Story Modes
Lite stories where you go on a little adventure made of finish-line-stages, the same thing with puzzlemode-challenges, or have a series of matches against several CP-opponents with an increase in difficulty, accompanied by some cutscenes between.


Credits

• Game-code written by KotatsuAkira, panel-pop (license: MIT) by a544jh is used for reference.
  
• Tech powered by Ruby 1.9.2 / RGSS3 (RPGVXAce, © 2011 Yoji Ojima, Gotcha Gotcha Games)
  
• Parts of current placeholder-graphics and audio-files are RTP-content
  

Progress and History
Creation of the game started in November 2020, but I had to put it on freeze short time after on emergency. Most of development-progress until now was made from late-2021 when the project was revived, to early-2022.

Generally, the game's basics are easily fine playable for a long time now, but it's far away from a finished and polished product.

Lots of content, the story-modes planned to be included, puzzle-modes gameplay with editor, energy-gameplay, graphics, characters, implementation of the already fully conceived configuration-menus and a ton of more things are still not present in the game.

Also it's incredibly hard for me to create a bot for CP-opponents, but this will be absolutely necessary to have, to release this game someday.

At last, I wanted to include a very special mode that may not make it into the final game due to heavily overexerting what Ruby 1.9.2 and GDI are able to lift performance-wise.