So I have played the start of the game a lot .... because I had this consulting design thing I did for a company(which I cant name) that simply wanted me to copy Candy Crush Saga and design a knockoff for them. Which is why I cant name what company :) Not that Candy Crush Saga in itself is super original but yeah that job felt a little weird. Mainly because its so boring, when someone tells you watch X change 10% of X and create Y. Yeah that don't feel very worth your time.
Anyway so this bug is something I have seen a lot and its really annoying because its the fundamental help mechanic that is bugged. That is also the reason why I write this now even do it might have been fixed (I doubt it because its been live for a like a year), because it is so prominent if you think about it. This is something any developer should think about is my point.
SO what is the bug?
When the player waits for a while without doing a match(move) in the game. The game will indicate movable candies to create a 3 or sometimes a better combo.
So this is a very important user friendly mechanic. And the problem is that it can give indication of tips that cannot be done, really bad bug.
In this image. The indication is that the player is supposed to move the orange candy to the right. If the player moves it one step to the left it would create a 3 match. This is true, but the player cannot move the bottom right as its stuck behind bars.
Given that the game is not to hard but still this bug nullifying the games supposed user friendly mechanic in some situations. Because right now the player gets no help.
But ok, that image it was just a small hiccup one candy could not be moved.
Its not so easy to spot this bug in an image. And is also freaking hard taking an image of it as its only for a second. Its a little easier with the classic red marking:
Those 3 purple candies are flashing indicating that they should be moved.
When it act like this...OOOOOK the player cannot move a single of the proposed candies.
In the first example is a kinda annoying and overall bad that this has existed in the game for so long.
But in the second example........... all the candies are stuck in bars so the game clearly take no consideration how the play-field is. I always thought it was obvious the hint help mechanic was bad from the start as it don't really say good matches. It does sometimes by random luck but it almost like it go for the worst(I am probably just experience a illogical fallacy but still).
The game might give some almost possible matches, that would still be a bug and decently severe. But then the player can come to this kind of situations its truly something that should be fixed in the code(its clear its a code issue and nothing else, they need to add a conditional statement that checks if the candies can be moved or not, which is a little tricky as it can be that the 2 others can be moved and by that be moved into a stuck candy creating a match. I guess thats why they ignored to have a check from the start. So they need 2 checks actually 1 that check if a match can be made and then a second that checks if the specific proposed candy(so they have to find what candy is to be moved should have that when they search for matches) and if it cannot be moved search for another match instead)
Yeah the game really need to check the available of the candies and not just search for 3 candies close to each other.
