I posted this in the wrong forum a couple of years ago, so I didn’t get responses. Maybe this is a better place for it. I would love to see a new mechanic that would be similar to the match 3 format, but create an “adventure feel” to the progress through levels. I saw this in a game intended to promote one of the Davinci Code movies about a decade ago, but haven’t seen it since.
The basic mechanic I am thinking of is a match 3 format where your hero tries to get from one location to another by matching 3+ nearby tiles and moving through the matched tiles. Early on, it is a simple moving across the board, but as the levels progress, the hero needs to move through passages and mazes that extend off the viewable screen area. It gets even more fun when a villain appears and starts to pursue the hero, ending the level or prompting a different kind of conflict when they catch up.
There are lots of ways to add from here, using hero specials to help advance them, creating foes that toss things at heroes from the sidelines, or lurk in parts of the maze, etc. use your imagination!
I would hope this wouldn’t be too hard to code since it keeps the basic match 3 format, but it would add an element of dynamism to the matching tasks and overall variety to the game.
I would love feedback on whether others would like something like this to give some more variety to how one can create an adventure out of a basic matching game.