History of an Idea

Posted on March 27th, 2026

I'm currently working on a match-3 rougelike called “Doogler's Wacky Match Tower” (working title). This game is actually a culmination of a thread of ideas that spanned many failed game ideas over the time I've been making games.

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Origins

It started with this game I made a long time ago, one of my first tries at making a game outside of Scratch. It didn't have a name. In fact, I never even finished the game past the basics. The premise was that it would be a pet simulator kinda in the same vein as tomagatchi but the twist was that it was also an incremental clicker game and the way you got upgrades to improve your DPS was to buy more pets and upgrade them.

Now this might sound interesting on a surface level, but as I soon learned, the two concepts didn't go very well together and overall the game just wasn't very fun to play. You can actually see for yourself because its one of the games available in Doogler Launcher. The game was kinda dead from the start because I didn't go in with a plan for how I wanted the game to play, it was just kinda a mashup of two different ideas.

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Development

Though the game was a failure, I still wanted to do something with the pet simulator idea so, learning from my mistakes, I decided that I would take the concept a different direction…

Randomly combining it with a different game genre: Match-3. I am a genius.

Big surprise, this game didn't end up getting finished either. This game was more pet simulator focused, with the match-3 aspect taking a sideline, serving as the way you upgraded and unlocked new pets. I ended up building an entire system where you could make and decorate rooms for your pets and they could freely travel between them. But when it came time to start on the match-3 part, I had no idea how to actually fit it into the game I had so far.

Once again, I didn't actually have an idea of how I wanted my game to play. It also didn't help that making a match-3 system was way too hard for my programming skill level at the time so I scrapped the game.

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Rebirth

Much later, after gaining some more experience with programming I wanted to challenge myself to create a match-3 system to test how much I've improved. When I was done with it, I was pretty happy with the foundation I made and didn't want to waste the effort so I had an idea. I could make match-3 rougelike like where you collect pet throughout the run and you could activate the pet's ability with resources gained by making matches on the board.

This was the start of Doogler's Wacky Match Tower. From there as I developed the game, the idea that I had for the it changed. I got rid of the idea of getting resources from each tile, pets turned into charms, and many other changes. Now the game is kinda like a deck builder. You buy charms from the shop which can provide passive or active effects. Active effects cost Energy to be used while passive effects happen in charm order each turn. After each shop you are given a choice between three Gambits. Gambits have an immediate upside and a downside that lasts for a set amount of turns.

I just thought it was interesting how you can see the evolution of the game throughout the previous abandoned game ideas.