Elemental Fusion Launched!

Well, as a surprise even to me, I went ahead and launched v1.0 of my game Elemental Fusion on Itch.io. I told myself that 2026 was the year that I would ship at least one game, and this was my first. The surprise came from decided to not let my vision of perfection stop me from achieving that goal, and I recognised that I was.

<a href="https://gwarakgames.itch.io/elemental-fusion">Elemental Fusion by Gwarak Games</a>

So what is Elemental Fusion?

Elemental Fusion is a retro-styled tile matching puzzle game, much like Candy Crush or Bejewelled, but with a chemistry inspired theme. You slide tiles, build matches and climb through the Periodic Table of Elements one level at a time.

Each level gives you a target element and a limited number of moves. As you play through creating matching lines (and other shapes), and can use chain reactions to upgrade tiles into heavier elements.

Only matches of the target element fill your test tube, so every move is about setting up the right sequence, not just clearing space.

As the campaign progresses, the board becomes more volatile. Burning tiles spread danger, frozen tiles lock up space, plasma and black holes clog the grid, and instability can push the whole board toward meltdown. The challenge is balancing clean setup, smart cascades, and survival under pressure.

Development

I created this game using the Phaser3 JavaScript engine, which is so awesome to work with and so feature-rich.

The the game itself utilises Phaser's primitive shape generation tools to build the graphics rather than using pre-designed sprite assets, as I wanted to avoid weird scaling issues between desktop and mobile sessions. I still do have some weird scaling issues to resolve but nothing that is a show-stopper for players right now.

I leveraged Phaser's shader features and included a set of visual FX that you can toggle on or off in the settings menu - these include scanlines, noise, ghosting and a CRT style look with a little vignette for good measure. I also used Phaser's particle emitter to add some sparkle to the tile matches, etc in-game which can also be toggled on/off in the settings.

For the music and sound I included the Zuper Zmall Zound Zynth (ZzFX) and Strudel libraries, both of which are super awesome too. Doing it this way meant I have control over the sounds and music dynamically and could introduce a rising BPM and additional instruments based on the status of the game - something I always loved about the iMuse system Lucasarts used in their classic adventure games.

I do have to declare that I got help with aspects of the development of this game from ChatGPT Codex. Whilst I have an understanding of JavaScript and even building rudimentary games in Phaser, some of the more complex stuff around tile matching patterns, etc I really struggled with, so I brought Codex into my toolset to help me get over that hurdle. I know that isn't to everyone's tastes, but I figured that I wanted to get something made, I needed help, and I'm not charging for it, so it's not doing any harm I guess.

What was my inspiration?

It was a moment of clarity whilst playing Block Blast and listening to The Rest Is Science podcast. I just had the idea suddenly about matching elements on a puzzle board and it all went from there.

I can highly recommend both Block Blast (very addictive, however the ads are a little intrusive) and The Rest is Science (also very addictive, as Michael and Hannah are just a joy to listen to!).

What is the plan now?

Well I've released v1.0 on Itch.io and I plan to continue tweaking the gameplay and supporting elements of the game. My biggest hang-up just before releasing this version was the music. I need to learn more about how Strudel works (because its feature-set is vast) to produce a much better set of scores for each scene in the game. At the moment they are.... workable.... but not great, I'll admit that. I'm no musician but I know what a good tune sounds like so I will keep plugging away on programming the beats until I hit on something that fits the theme of the game.

Beyond the music I do also have some other small tweaks I want to make, but I will keep these to the devlog on Itch (and perhaps BlueSky in a shorter format) if anyone is interested.

I do really hope you enjoy playing my game. I know its FAR from perfect, but I am kinda new to all of this so I'm finding my way as best I can, attempting to fulfil the dream of being a game dev I've had all my life since the days of BASIC on my Sinclair Spectrum.