Holiday Cheer

Holiday Cheer is a match-3 puzzle game about Christmas. Swap two gems, line up three or more, watch them burst into snow while a new row tumbles in from the top with a little jingle of sleigh bells. That's the loop.

About:

This is the second game I ever made,  built in 2012.

It went up on the mobile app stores and a few websites, sold a modest number of copies, and then did what almost every small game does :  it quietly disappeared off the store pages and sales dwindled. It's been sitting on a hard drive on my PC ever since, all seven thousand lines of it, complete and finished and playable.  Back then self-publish on Itch or Steam was not an option.

What you actually get

• Classic — nine levels, each with its own painted winter backdrop. Score your way up and the board gets busier as new pieces are introduced at levels 3, 6 and 9. When you level up, the whole board drops out the bottom of the screen behind an avalanche of snow and you start fresh. Play until you run out of moves.
• Zen — the same board, the same scoring, but the piece variety never climbs. Seven types, start to finish, at a difficulty that stays exactly where you left it. For when you want the rhythm without the ramp.
• Timed — sixty seconds on the clock, and the clock doesn't start until you do. Clear five in one go and you buy back two seconds. Six gets you three. Seven or more gets you four. Every big cascade is a stay of execution.

Two power-ups, both earned by playing well:

• Match four in a row and a snowball drops into the line. Set it off and it detonates in a nine-square burst of powder.
• Chain two matches from a single move and a Christmas light strings itself onto the board somewhere. Trigger it and a bolt runs the full length of its row and its column — sixteen squares gone in one crack of light.

Earn one right before a level-up and it survives the transition. The board resets; your snowball is still sitting there waiting.

And the rest of it:

• An upbeat rendition of Jingle Bells loops behind everything, with independent volume sliders for music and effects — because I know some of you will want the sleigh bells and none of the carol.
• A stuck-button Hint spins an arrow over a move you missed. Free in Classic and Zen; costs you a second in Timed.
• A local top-ten high score table, saved to a file on your machine. Not a leaderboard. Not a friends list. A file.
• Full localization in English, Spanish, French and German — menus, mode names, level-up text, even the how-to-play screen art.

What you don't get

No ads.

No in-app purchases. 

No DRM. Download it, copy it, back it up, keep it. 

No account, no login, no email capture, no cloud save, no telemetry, no analytics.

Happy holidays.