Jungular was invented and designed by me, Nalin Sharma, for my company PuzzleKings.

After ZooCube, our first game, was launched we won several awards for its innovative design and received many good reviews. When it was launched in Japan we had some feedback saying that the game did not allow multiple objects to explode simultaneously i.e. it did not support combos and chain reactions - this was the seed in the thinking behind Jungular.

As ZooCube is a true 3D puzzle game it is difficult to think of a way to align objects such that they can support combos and chains - it’s much easier to do this in 2D and originally Jungular started life as a mobile phone game. The key design steps behind inventing the game mechanics are listed below which you may find informative:

1. The ZooCube concept was stretched into 2D to have shapes coming down from the top, like many falling-block games. 
2. Each column pertained to a side of the cube and could be juggled up and down which was confusing for the player - do you look at the falling object, or the column?
3. Juggling columns was abandoned in favour of being able to move objects around in the grid to get identical objects to stick together - this allowed large combos but effectively killed the game
4. By this time I was running out of ideas and wondered whether the game should continue. During a holiday in Sardinia I decided to tackle the key design problems within the context of the popular casual games that people were playing on the Internet. This analysis yielded the following conclusions about the typical shape-matching games available at the time:
• Most were clones of each other and offered nothing new
• They did not allow players to deterministically create combos and stack chains
• There was no natural “end” - relying on a time limit seems compromising and does not allow scope for future multiplayer modes
• There were no real gaming goals - something that appeals more to old-skool gamers who grew up with arcade games that make your heart pound.
• Being able to only swap adjacent shapes seemed incredibly restricting and frustrating
5. Whether it was the sun or the Sardinian waters, this was the turning point as it resulted in shapes accumulating from the bottom and the ability to swap any two shapes. Combos were achieved through nudging after swapping shapes that did not explode
6. By this time we had a very competent mobile game, but the requirement of operators to support 200 skus (versions) and their reluctance to distribute original titles effectively removed any hope of publishing
7. We had to decide whether to kill the project or move it to the PC casual game space - and chose the latter as we were very confident in the core game
8. The first PC version playable confirmed that the game should stand up well in the casual game space, though after talking through a video of the game with Joel at Gamezebo I realised that making combos by nudging was too complicated
9. Then I thought “why not just drag and drop” - something everyone who uses a mouse is familiar with? We added it and it was a revelation
10. Finally all the polish was added with sound, music and graphics and we think the end result is something people might enjoy playing.

Building any game is hard and it requires a lot of dedication and perseverance - the elapsed time on all of the above activities was over two and a half years!

© 2007 PuzzleKings LLP