Dejeweled (a Bejeweled demake for Pico8)

To play, download for

Mac 7.8MB
Windows 1MB
Linux 789KB
Raspberry Pi 2.3MB

You can also download the PICO8 cart (31KB) and load it manually into PICO8

Play in the browser

Once you're in the game, arrow keys to move, X to select, Z to change power-gem mode. You can swap those two buttons over in the PICO-8 pause menu. Mouse works too: click a gem then click a neighbour, or just drag it.

Basic rules

There's no in-game rules screen. It's not been a priority because I think most people know how to play match-3, and self-discovery of the rules is half the fun in my opinion. If you haven't played the original game, I'd recommend Bejeweled 2 as the best version of the game, go try that first - or buy Bejeweled 3, it's great too.

However, I realise it can be helpful to know what the game does differently.

The two modes

You pick a mode on the title screen, and the board rules are identical in both. Both start you with no lifelines. What changes is how you earn them, and whether your score can be multiplied.

• Arcade runs the combo timer described below. Chain matches quickly and your multiplier climbs, and every nine matches in a row earns a lifeline.
• Chill switches the combo system off entirely. No timer, no multiplier, no rising tones as a chain builds. Lifelines come from one place only: swapping two prisms together.

Each mode keeps its own high score.

Chill is the better option if you're on a D-pad or keyboard. Arcade is more fun if you're using a mouse.

Dejeweled's extra rules

Five black rocks drop onto the grid every level, and from level 10 onwards bedrocks start appearing too.

Rocks can't be matched, and they won't move around freely (although they can move if it results in a match-three, or if smashed together with another rock).

The ways to destroy them:

• Catch one in a power-gem explosion
• Smash two rocks together (both shatter)
• Swap a prism into one (clears every rock on the grid)
• Swap two prisms together to wipe the whole board
• Line up three or more rocks

That last one is a key strategy: lining up three rocks destroys every rock on the board and gives you a free prism in the middle of the line. Four rocks gives two prisms, five gives three. Since five rocks arrive every level, they become less of an obstacle, and more a way of getting prisms.

This matters, because of bedrocks.

Bedrocks

From level 10, one bedrock appears every level. They can't be matched, and explosions pass straight through them. The only things that shift them are a prism swapped directly into one, which clears the lot, or a two-prism board wipe.

You can move them, though. A bedrock follows the same movement rule as a rock, so a swap that makes a line with the gem on the other side will move it one square. A bedrock in an awkward corner isn't permanent furniture. However, two bedrocks swapped together do nothing - unlike rocks, they won't shatter each other.

They will fill the board eventually. That's the point: the game has an ending, and how far you get depends on whether you can keep making prisms faster than the bedrocks arrive.

Power-gem explosion types

Power-gems explode in one of three ways, and you can toggle between them at any time with Z or a right-click. The icon in the bottom-right corner shows which is armed, and clicking it cycles them too.

• Square (default) - takes out a 3x3 grid with the power-gem(s) at the centre.
• Horizontal - takes out the entire row that the power-gem(s) sit in.
• Vertical - takes out the entire column that the power-gem(s) sit in.

No shape is better than the others. A square clears one more gem, but a row or column reaches right across the board. And if two power-gems sit in the same row, a row explosion wastes the second one while a square makes them chain.

Lifelines

Lifelines work the same way in both modes. Run out of moves with a lifeline in hand and the board reshuffles itself instead of ending the run. At zero, the game ends. You can hold up to seven, but you start with none.

The heart icon sits on the right-hand side with the number embossed on it, so you can always see how many you're carrying.

Swapping two prisms together wipes the board and earns you a lifeline, in either mode. In Arcade that's one of two sources. In Chill it's the only one, which makes a spare prism worth holding on to.

Combos and the multiplier (Arcade only)

None of this applies in Chill mode, where the bar is hidden and your multiplier stays at 1.0x.

Every match starts a timer, shown as a bar on the right-hand side. Make another match before it empties and your multiplier goes up by 0.2, to a maximum of 2.8x. Cascades count too, and each wave refills the bar.

Nine matches in a row fills the heart icon above the bar, and you earn a lifeline. While a combo is building, the number on the icon hides and it fills with the colour of the next one up. Fail the combo and it drains away again.

The timer gets shorter the more lifelines you hold - two seconds with none, down to one second at six. So the game tightens as you build a cushion, and loosens again when you spend one. At seven lifelines the combo system switches off entirely, exactly as it is in Chill.

The bar only drains while the board is settled, so animations never cost you time. Nothing bad happens if you let it run out; you just drop back to a 1.0x multiplier. It's an optional bonus for making quick moves, not a requirement.

The combo resets at the end of each level.

Other features

Move counter: the word "Dejeweled" on the right shows how many gems have moves available. One letter lights up light-grey per available move, so four moves lights "DEJE". Prisms show as white letters.

Hint system: leave the game alone for six seconds and a gem wiggles in the direction of a move it suggests. It points at rock moves first, since those are easiest to miss, and only suggests a prism if there's nothing else. You can turn it off in the pause menu.

High score: shown in brackets at the bottom right, and persists between console reboots. Arcade and Chill are scored separately, so the figure you see is the best for the mode you're playing.

Why I made this

Bejeweled was an obsession for a time. It's as close to a perfect puzzle game as I've ever played. But something was missing: the difficulty never really ramped. Later levels asked for more matches, not better ones. You just keep going until the board runs out of moves. I admire its purity in that regard, but felt it needed something else to add to the strategic planning.

I spent years looking for a match-3 that could beat it and never found one. Almost every one I've tried in the last decade has pay-to-win baked in, or some other dark pattern. Eventually I gave up on the genre.

Then a few weeks ago I rediscovered PICO-8, bought back in 2016 and barely touched. Seeing all the 'demakes', I wondered if anyone had made a decent match-3, but couldn't find anything that scratched that itch on the BBS. So on a whim I purchased Aseprite, meticulously drew the grid of gems and other graphics to see if it would even fit in 128x128, and asked Claude to build it, just to test my own variation on the rules. Hundreds of small changes later, it's pretty much done and I can't put it down.

Lexaloffle has a strict anti-AI policy on their BBS, and I don't blame them. I struggle with the quandary daily: the environmental cost of AI and the creative people on whose backs it's built, not to mention the impact on society, both hidden and direct. It's something I suspect many of us are struggling to learn to live with.

And yet. It's helped me make my dream game, and taught me a lot doing it. I still don't know what to do with that. But until I figure that out, I'll be playing this on my RG CubeXX in my spare moments, rather than wasting time doomscrolling!

Download the game

I made this primarily for myself, but if you want a copy you can download a compiled version for Mac, Windows, Linux, or Raspberry Pi. You can also download the PICO8 cart and load it manually into PICO8, or just play it directly in the browser.

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