I recently had the idea to mix a Match-3 game like Bejeweled or Candy Crush with the game structure of a roguelite and ended up with this concept for a game. The player is traveling through some sequence of rooms encountering events and enemies which they need to combat in order to progress.
Item pickups may provide the player with new equipment or the ability to alter the shape of their game board. But once an enemy is encountered, the player needs to choose from their equipment and get to matching.
When a piece of a equipment is matched, its associated meter is filled with progress based on the number of icons matched. When full, it activates an effect like healing the player, blocking incoming damage, or dealing out damage to the opponent. But watch out! The opponents will attack back after every few moves.
There's a lot of work left to do here to make it playable, especially in the graphics department, but I've been enjoying the concept and hope to revisit it for more development in the future. I'm quite happy with the piece icon animations as they fall into the board. This took a lot of work to get the movements correct, but I've managed to produce dynamic boards which can be altered in any way, adding and removing tiles. The pieces adjust their movements accordingly and are quite pleasing to watch!