Trinity

I died :(

High marks for gameplay on this one. The mechanics really do lead to interesting decision-making. Some gameplay comments:

• What if you could not take an orb from anywhere, but only from the top? Might require that you reduce the number of types of orb to, say, three to keep it playable.
• How about also allowing vertical columns of three orbs, which launch in three adjacent rows, but only knock out the front enemy instead of everyone?
• Some automatic respawning mechanism? Right now it's an interesting choice all by itself: respawning gives you options, but might also take options away.
• I think you could lose the Actions counter if the enemies just made one step for every move you made, but they made smaller steps. Might even add some tension.
• I survived until turn 52, but it got a bit boring near the end. It might be nice to increase the difficulty not just by spawning more enemies, but also by giving them more interesting behaviour (like changing lanes, maybe pre-announced), or changing your own abilities (e.g. "rock" orbs that just get in the way, or "booster" orbs that make the spell more powerful).

This would work great on mobile too, but would be better in a portrait ratio with the orbs at the bottom.

Was a bit confusing in the beginning even after skimming through the instructions. Mainly becasuse I wanted to know what the bugfixed version contained, usually I'm one of those people who don't read them… 🤤

After thinking I undestood it (was very confused about them not firing immediately), I find out I screwed myself by thinking the vertical matches would also work. The orb respawn should obviously be automatic after there were no more orbs left.

There wasn't much skill involved in the gameplay really. Could have been solved in several different ways. Like doing classing combo setup stuff as almost all match x puzzlers do. Another quite easy way to make it less luck based would be not allowing grabbing of orbs that are completely surrounded.

The orbs looked pretty cool, actual 3d objects with some shader magic? They did not fit the rest of the look very well though. And the color selection made them look a bit too muddy for my tastes at least. The grid should have covered the whole playfield to make it easier to follow the line to the baddies. And then probably be like a 50% opacity black or white so it wouldn't get too dominant.

The selection background hover doesn't appear after the firing lock unless moving the cursor to another cell. Playing on a 16:10 screen added a bit more difficulty because can't see the baddies for as far away 😎

And even though you opted out of audio, I'm still gonna nag about it. Lack of music I fully undestand as I myself am really lacking on that skill department as well but adding sound effects is one of the easiest and fastest things to do to make the game actions have more of an impact. Using generators like Bfxr, you can hack up your games all sfx needs in mere minutes. And if you wanna get fancy with it, layering many generated effects together makes them sound less like stock generation sounds. And another easy hack is to add a random pitch variation to them on each play so they don't get too repetitive.

Anyways, good job!

Anyone that is able to innovate on the match-three pattern get +1 on originality from me instantly. :)
Great start of a new game type. I agree with the comment that this would work well on mobile too. It could then have stages if you want and all sorts of additions to add more variety. The other commenters already have some great pointers here. But make no mistake, you have a very VERY solid prototype here that can only get better if you can add more time to it.

Only gripe I have is that it took me some time to figure out the controls: they were not completely intuitive.

Nice game, I really like the simple concept. However I wish you had taken more time to balance the game (or maybe I just suck) because I found it hard to get past many turns. Also more audio and visual feedback would've been nice. I still found it super enjoyable overall though! (Oh also there's a bug on the web version where restarting after dying removes all your orbs)