A fine day to you, readers.
Well, I certainly had some interesting coding problems in the final run-up to completion; I managed to completely lose track of the way the code worked for the sideways perspective of the game-view (necessary to ensure proper generation of the levels via the code), and ended up having to make a bunch of edits and compromises to the way it works on the fundamental generation code.
But, it's good that I encountered these problems when I did, rather than any later; the issues have been resolved, even if I'm not overly fond of the resolved result. It's really just niggling annoyances, things like having to switch the "width" and "height" variables around in some places, but not in others, makes the code less user-friendly and intuitive. But I made a number of comments explaining it where it's needed, and it's not a serious problem either way.
With those bugs out of the way, I am happier to say that, after the tutorial levels (the first four grids, which introduce the base mechanics of the game), there are two further levels. They're not as refined as a professional level should be, but they're enough to demand some thought from the player before making a move.
Personally, I'm happy for these two levels to roughly represent some later stages of gameplay, the first one showing perhaps an early to intermediate level, and the second a more advanced stage, either intermediate or late level, requiring more careful thought and possibly some experimentation by the player.
Along with the other levels, this should draw a rough picture of how the game will stand if development of levels were to continue without any additional mechanics or features. Of course, that isn't to say that more mechanics couldn't be introduced, and many puzzle games make great use of adding more elements to the gameplay, making the game more and more advanced as the player continues to play.
If I had to guess, the most likely route of new mechanics would take one of two forms: new Bubble types that interact with the rest of the grid in different ways (perhaps popping different patterns of surrounding Bubbles, or which only affect other Bubbles if popped directly). The other possibility would be some restricted player ability to add Bubbles to the board themselves, letting them bridge or fill in gaps on the board, which would function nicely with the "Line" Bubbles, which require that constant bridge to continue going.
Overall, I'm satisfied with this game where it stands. I've learnt a bit about managing grids in code (such as via Multidimensional Arrays), and maintaining absolute understanding of the way the code may compensate for in-scene variances, especially with variances of perspective.
And that's that. The end of my dissertation. I've handed in all of the Conversion Phase and Final Project files, and all that's left to do is to wrap up this blog and call it a year. I'll post another update tomorrow with my full thoughts on the dissertation, including how it went, what I learnt, how much I'm going to miss all of this, the usual stuff.
But, until then, I'll just say thank you, readers, and have a wonderful day.


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