If you’re tired of the same old “match three” games, we have a fun alternative for you. In Zaz, you control a vehicle or a grabber on a predefined path, and by dragging and dropping you arrange different colored balls in triplets to make them explode and disappear. The game can be played in sequential mode, where the player proceeds through one level after another, or survival mode, where the battle is fought on a single level with more and more different balls appearing over time and the game speeding up until the player can no longer handle the pressure.
If that sounds a lot like the games Luxor, Zuma, Atlantis, and PuzzLoop, you’re on the right track. Developer Remigiusz Dybka says the name Zaz comes from “Zaz ain’t Zuma,” but gameplay differs in some important ways:
• Other games have the player rotating in place or placed on a line. In Zaz, the player is put on a path just like the balls are, which allows for greater variation between levels and occasionally really wild gameplay.
• In Zaz, the player rearranges balls on the paths instead of shooting randomly drawn balls. This allows for tricky combos and movement of bonus balls between paths.
• Zaz can have balls of different sizes (as in its Tunnel level) and, in theory, an unlimited number of paths on a single level (The Joker and Spiralis levels).
For as long as he can remember, Dybka wanted to father an open source game. “It makes me proud to be one of the hackers,” he says. A game like Zaz hadn’t been done before on Linux, he says (though the game is cross-platform), and when he came to UK from Poland last year and was struggling to find a job in the industry, the time was finally right.
Dybka uses GCC and AutoTools to build the application on Linux and MinGW with CodeBlocks on Windows. “I use GCC because I see no alternative to C/C++ when it comes to creating fast, demanding applications, and GCC is the obvious choice, while AutoTools has become a standard. To create media, I used Blender for rendering, the GIMP for everything else in graphics, and LMMS and Audacity to create sound effects.”
Zaz is currently at version 0.7, which was released this month, and is under active development. Dybka says version 1.0 will eventually include 23 different levels and internationalization on Win32 – and all known bugs resolved. He hopes to finish development by the end of summer, “so users can know that what they have in hand is a complete product and not some ongoing work in progress. I will of course support it and fix any issues that come up after that, so there will surely be versions 1.0.1, 1.0.2 …”
Dybka hopes others will one day create additional levels or level sets, or a themed version of the game with its own levels and graphics. “Those things are really easy to do. I’m not too confident with making graphics myself; I would love to see some levels done by ‘pros’.” If you want to get involved, you can contact Dybka via e-mail.