A classic matching game remake I made in Unity

When I was somewhere around ten years old, my brother and I were given Dr. Mario as a Christmas gift by our parents. Our game time was very limited back then, so for the rest of the day I visualized dropping the perfect pill to get a double or triple match.

A few weeks ago, I was following along with a book, "Classic Game Design Second Edition" by Franz Lanzinger, when it struck me that it shouldn't be too hard to make my own Dr. Mario clone. That's what we have here to demonstrate.

Here is a video of the game in action:

The scripts are at this github link: https://github.com/bigmekben/unitygames-pillmatchgame

To develop this, I made a list of the features that a Dr. Mario clone would need; then I arranged them by what I thought was the most important, such as moving a falling "pill" (squares) and detecting when they "land".

I saved matching for later, once the movement and landing logic was completely working. I saved features such as allowing the pill to flip, automatically generating the viruses, etc. for later.

There are still some features of the original Dr. Mario that aren't in this version. I have a list of those features as future to-do. I may come back to this project someday to add them.

Issues I ran into:

- At one point, prefabs weren't instantiating. The code would execute, but nothing was added to the Hierarchy Window or visible in the game window. Stackoverflow and other searches only found people for whom Instantiate wasn't actually getting triggered, due to their own coding mistakes. But I attached to the debugger to verify that the line in my code with the Instantiate call was actually getting executed.

I finally attributed this to some glitch in Unity, so I removed the script and repopulated it. After some tweaking, it started working. I should have written down the exact steps I took to fix it. If this happens again, hopefully I'll be able to arrive at the solution more quickly.

Credits:

- I did the C# coding.

- I made the "virus" models in Maya.

- I authored the sounds in Audacity using the Generate menu (no recordings).

- I built and arranged the game pieces in Unity.

- I researched the original Dr. Mario's functionality and rules by playing the original NES cartridge.