A 2-D bubble-swapping puzzle game without a grid! Join 5 bubbles of the same color to make them pop!
- Click a bubble bordering the empty space to swap it in.
- If the newly swapped bubble touches a like-colored bubble, they merge.
- Every merge grants you an extra swap (up to a maximum of 5)!
- Merge 5 or more bubbles together and they pop!
- String together multiple merges or pops to trigger chain bonuses.
- You lose if you run out of swaps.
I started working on this game as a hobby project way back in 2004. I always meant to get it working well enough to publish it and even got it into beta, but I never got it 100% right. I went through many iterations before I hit on the current system of approximating the bubble walls with cubic Bézier curves and using a full Euler-Lagrange technique. You can read more about the underlying physics and math in bubblemath.pdf.
In 2018, Stu Denman at Pine Street Codeworks independently developed a similar idea and published Tiny Bubbles which won many well-deserved awards. Honestly, it's a lot better than my game ever was, and I feel a tiny bit vindicated that he proved the idea was a good one, even if I never found time to properly execute it.
Ultimately, I'm pretty sure the reason it took so long was that I made the classic programmer mistake of using the tools I was familiar with (Java) instead of the right tools for the job (C++, which I have always hated). With Gemini CLI (which I also worked on!), I was able to port this to Rust where it does not suffer from the performance issues that dogged the previous versions.
Previous iterations have had different rules. Most allowed you to swap any two bubbles. Swapping any adjacent items is a popular mechanic in lots of games (like Bejeweled) but it doesn't work well in a bubble graph since by default they form hex grids which are much more connected than square ones. Joining like-colored bubbles and popping has been a feature almost from the beginning because it looks cool.
To run the game natively on macOS, Windows, or Linux, run the following command from the root of the repository:
cargo run --manifest-path rust/Cargo.toml --release(Using --release ensures the physics and rendering run at maximum performance).