XSwing Plus

Open Source remake of a classic match 3 arcade game.

💡 Trivia

The original game was named Swing (Marble Master) and was developed by Software 2000 a German game developer and publisher. It was released in 1997 for PC, PlayStation and Game Boy Color.

My goal was to bring this masterpiece of arcade action back to life. I wanted to recreate the original graphics and game mechanics as accurately as possible. The game is written in Java and runs on Windows, Linux, Mac and Android.

⭐ Features

⭐ Spiffy addictive gameplay
⭐ Hot Seat multiplayer mode
⭐ 45 Challenging Levels
⭐ Offline and online highscore
⭐ Particle and sound effects
⭐ Multilingual (German and English)

📖 Manual

The objective is to simultaneously disband as many heavy balls as possible. To do this, simply place three balls with the same color in a horizontal row. Now these and all adjoining balls of this color will disappear. Five balls of the same color in a column will shrink to one heavy ball. Every 50 balls you reach the next level and a new color will be added. Pay attention: One stack can only take up to eight balls.

⌨ Controls

←/→: Move the crane
 ↓: Drop a ball
 N: New Game
 B: Change the ball set
 E: Disable particle effects
 ESC: Exit the game
 F2: Toggle Fullscreen
 S: Change game size (experimental)

To use the app, you need at least a Java 1.8 JRE. You can get it for any platform here.

🎮 Start

The game needs an installed Java runtime environment (JRE) with at least 8. You can get it for any platform here. For example on Windows choose: * Operating System: Windows * Architecture: x64 * Package Type: JRE * Version: 8 - LTS And download the .msi installer.

If the .jar wile type is linked with the java, you can simply start the game by opening the XSwingPlus.jar. Otherwise, start the game with console:

java -jar XSwingPlus.jar

📜 Licence

This remake is a free fan project. Software 2000 is not involved in any way. The company Software 2000 filed for bankruptcy in 2002. But the Swing brand, graphics and sounds may still be licenced by others. I tried to contact someone from the original team to get permission to use the original theme - but without success. Another clone of the game for Android and IOS was also available under the name Color-X-Plode.
The code is licenced under MIT License.

I started the development in 2007 - A time when git took its first steps and version control wasn't the first thing to do. This repository was restored from zipped code backups between 2007 and 2013.

🧱 Dependencies

• Slick2D - 2D Java game library based on LWJGL.
• LWJGL - Lightweight Java Game Library.
• Nifty GUI - Open Source Java OpenGL GUI.
• Java 1.8 - Programming Language and SDK.