This Is Not a Bug but a Game Feature-Chapter 119 - 106: Garbage Disposal Fun

Match-three games are very basic.

It is widely known that the more basic a thing is, the harder it is to innovate, because the ceiling has already been set.

With so many match-three games on the market, setting aside the flashy art styles and gameplay modes, how does Tianba Studio’s match-three game manage to stand out?

Is it because you are more handsome?

The essence of a game is to be fun, only fun games can attract players and keep them.

But everyone’s match-three game has the same core, playability and gameplay are also common, there is simply no so-called differentiation...

Unless it’s something cheeky!

But that’s impossible, as a reputable game developer, Tianba Studio is also a reputable game studio, it’s unlikely they’ll take this shortcut, relying on boundary-pushing to attract players.

"You keep talking, but Ba, you haven’t given a specific plan!"

Lu rolled his eyes and said, "If it’s not cheeky, and we are properly making a match-three mobile game, then I feel I might as well go play Happy Elimination."

"Listen to me first..."

Chen Ba explained, "Didn’t I say! For our game to stand out among countless match-three mobile games, we need to create certain innovative differentiation."

What kind of differentiation?

Of course, it’s to give the game an exclusive ’selling point’ that other match-three mobile games don’t have or can’t achieve.

"Give me your phone!"

Chen Ba reached out to Lu to ask for his phone, and Lu didn’t hesitate, he took out a Huazi mate30 from his pocket and gave it to him.

"Been using it for quite a while, huh?"

"Yeah!"

Lu nodded, "This phone was bought by my dad, it’s been two or three years, I need to save money to buy a house, haven’t been willing to switch to a new phone."

"128G is all occupied..."

After scanning Lu’s phone with various installed apps and memory usage details, Chen Ba returned the phone to him, and then asked, "Have you used phone garbage clean-up software?"

"Used it! Some duplicate files, installation packages, and cache files, I occasionally remember to clean up. After all, the phone memory is small, often filled up by various files."

"Good habit, I recommend keeping it!"

Chen Ba said with a smile, "Cleaning up garbage files in your phone regularly is something many people do, and it’s also why many cleaning apps have high download counts."

Cleaning apps?

Why bring this up?

No... after being around Ba for so long, Lu seemed to catch on to Ba’s thought pattern and suddenly realized, "Ba, are you thinking of combining garbage cleaning with match-three?"

"Exactly!"

Once his idea was guessed correctly, Chen Ba did not hide it and explained his reason: "Garbage cleaning apps have always had a high download volume and a batch of loyal supporters."

"If we can convert these people into players of our game, letting them play while cleaning up the bloated garbage files on their phones, then we won’t lack players."

"The blocks to be eliminated can be made into chibi app icons, tiptoeing around infringement, looking very similar but not the original ones."

"Combining three WeChat icons for elimination, you can clear part of WeChat’s cached garbage files, combining three album icons for elimination can clear duplicate photo files in the album..."

This works?

For the first time, Lu heard of someone turning phone garbage file cleaning into a match-three game for people to play.

The operation that could originally be completed with a click of "one-button cleaning" now requires playing a game, and you need to clear levels to clean.

Wouldn’t this make it more troublesome?

"If you take this game as a normal phone garbage cleaning software, then in terms of operational logic, it would indeed become more complex and troublesome."

Chen Ba explained, "But this is a match-three game, a game to kill time! During gameplay, cleaning phone garbage files in passing, isn’t it a win-win?"

Play games, clean garbage!

When the two things merge together, and with ’playing games’ as the main focus, it’s no longer troublesome, but even more convenient.

"Seems like it makes some sense..."

Lu was faintly persuaded by Ba, but he quickly thought of another question: is it difficult to achieve this?

"Actually, it’s not difficult!"

Chen Ba shook his head with a smile.

Whether it’s match-three or garbage cleaning programs, they are all quite basic things, even without requiring the system to step in, Chen Ba can produce a decent-looking finished product.

The main thing is cleaning speed!

During the game, each time a player eliminates a software block, a garbage cleaning instruction is executed in the background to clean the APP.

There are so many apps on the phone, and each app involves many types of files, which ones are garbage files and which are not?

"Before entering the game, we’ll have the player check off the types of garbage files they want to clean, such as useless installation packages, duplicate files, cache data..."

"This way the range of cleaning is greatly reduced, but it will still face one problem, which is the speed of retrieving files might not keep up with the player’s block elimination speed."

Chen Ba looked a bit embarrassed.

This is indeed a big problem, garbage cleaning software generally performs a retrieval and screening of local files, if this process is slow, it can take a few minutes, the fastest may take ten to twenty seconds.

But when players are playing the game, block elimination is almost one after another, and sometimes triggering combo hits allows elimination of more than a dozen blocks within a few seconds.

In such a short time, how can garbage cleaning software retrieve garbage files and then quickly execute the "cleaning" operation?