Bejeweled 3 is not a really good game choice for TASing. For 2 reasons:
1) Entertainment. As we can see in this submission from 2012, it gets boring quickly. Yeah, this is one of the games which are entertaining when you play it, and not so entertaining when you watch a TAS.
2) Optimization. When you make a combo, a set of jewels, which falls from the top, is selected at random, depending on the time moment at which the combo was done. That means, each quest should be heavily bruteforced high and low in order to achieve your goals in the fastest time.
I'd say, optimization is the main restriction here.
Bejeweled 3 has not a big variety of goals. It has it's own set of achievements, but I don't think any of them, besides Levelord, worth its submission, as they are aimed at an extremely long play.
So, I would emphasize 2 reasonable goals: Levelord (short) and Quest Mode (long), which we'll focus on below.
Special Gems glossaryFlame Gem - collect 4 gems in a line. Blows 8 cells around it. All gems above the explosion jump up, but it's still the fastest interruption among special gems.
Star Gem - collect 5 gems forming an 90-degree angle: these are 4 variations of "L" and the "+" variation. Clears the whole row and the whole column which are traversed by the gem.
Hypercube - collect 5 gems in a line. Clears all gems of the kind a hypercube was swapped with.
Note: combining 2 hypercubes clears all the gems on the field.
Supernova - collect 6 gems in a line. Can be made only the game drops multiple gems from the top after you've made a combo. Provides the multiplied effect of a Flame Gem and a Start Gem, i.e. clears 3 rows and the 3 columns which are traversed by the gem.
Quest Mode
Quest mode consists of 40 stages, introducing 11 game modes.
Alchemy
Vertical combos cover columns. Horizontal ones cover rows. 8 matches on each line in 1 direction is enough to cover the whole field.
Things get a little complicated when you need to cover the field twice, but I think the strategy is still regular combos. Special gems are not that game changers here.
Avalanche
This mode is slow-pacing. Not much can be done here. Combos should be done during a fall of a gem line, to make them fall at the full speed. Making combos in other moments will pause the timer which drops a new line of gems.
It's possible to swap a gem with an empty space if there is no question mark above it.
Blowing a Star Gem at the end will save some time comparing to making 3-4 combos after the last needed line of gems.
Balance
It's about manipulating the frequency of red and blue gems. Don't let more than 3 columns be unsortable because, the more combos you do, the more gems fall down and red/blue ones are seen more often. Special gems are not that required.
Butterflies
Every time you make 1-2 combos, a random gem at the bottom turns into a butterfly and each combo makes it jump one space above, until it reaches the top.
It's about the frequency of combos to spawn more butterflies. It's not that hard to make combinations with them.
Gold Rush
The main problem is making combos at the bottom to break the ground cells. Blowing a Supernova, especially, near the bottom, is the fastest strategy. Well, a Star Gem along the line with gold cells is good too, but who knows if this will be faster than a Supernova.
Ice Storm
It's about making frequent combos and blowing Flame Gems because of their short interruptions.
Poker
Obviously, to get a Flush hand, you gotta rely on manipulations of the random. Say there are 3 available combos of the same color. You do these combos and make the game drop gems of the same color to do 2 more combos, resulting in having a Flush (5 of a kind).
Unfortunately, each your gem swap result gets recorded on one of 5 cards, so there are not much possibilities to prepare the field for the next set of cards without ruining your card combination. I don't think it's possible to collect constant Flushes (5 of a kind), but the rotation of Flushes and quads (4 of a kind) is definitely possible.
Also, combining a special gem gives you +50 points to the result.
Sandstorm / Buried Treasure
You gotta clear specific areas to pull the items out. The strategy is the same as in Ice Storm. It's about making frequent combos and blowing Flame Gems because of their short interruptions.
Stratamax
Since we have a limited number of moves, it's about manipulating cascade combos and blowing Flame Gems because of their short interruptions.
Time Bomb
You gotta make combos with specific gems with timers. 3-4 combos trigger a new bomb to drop down from the top. Not much to say. Flame Gems may come in handy.
Wall Blast
Flame Gems are not so useful here because they may not cover much of the wall blocks. Supernova is the fastest strategy because it covers much space.
I actually managed to make 2 hypercubes and join them to cover the whole field, but I think it's a slow strategy.
Jewels Random
The game drops new jewels at random for each of 8 columns which have less than 8 jewels after combining some of those. It also keeps track of total quantities of each color on the board, as well as the amount of possible combos, but it's not too restricted.
In rare cases, but easy enough to face it in a regular play, the game drops multiple jewels of the same color, making it easier for you to get powerful jewels.
In even more rare cases, you can get 5 (hypercube) or 6 (supernova) similar jewels in a row just dropped down for you. This is the main point of manipulation for the fastest strategy to complete some of the non-trivial goals.
In all modes, except Classic, the game doesn't let the player run out of combinations by always providing a set of jewels which make at least one combo possible. For a TAS, if you get into this situation, that definitely means you gotta replay a stage or rewind continuous playthrough to get a better random.
Here is my TAS which beats the Quest Mode. It's rather a low-effort run, cuz' I didn't bother beating each stage in the fastest time. A human may spend dozens of hours on each stage to get objectively fastest time, I think it's a work for a bot to mesh buttons.
Link to video
Here is the input file. I don't know why you'd need it, but anyway.
User movie #638173207203289282
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Joined: 2/26/2020
Posts: 44
Location: Super Bell Hill
Thank you for doing this! You have a pretty good understanding of the game. It is indeed difficult to test the near unlimited nunber of possibilities.
However I am not sure if you are aware of a glitch being present. I watched the WR on SRC (the platform is PC). By swapping a jewel into a blank tile while the jewels above drop to refill, one dropping jewel gets deleted, allowing for much more versatility (and the number of possibilities). Is said glitch also possible on the DS version?
I also want to question, is destroying star gems and hypercubes slow? it seems that normal matching can destroy gems faster than these 2 special gems.
However I am not sure if you are aware of a glitch being present. I watched the WR on SRC (the platform is PC). By swapping a jewel into a blank tile while the jewels above drop to refill, one dropping jewel gets deleted, allowing for much more versatility (and the number of possibilities). Is said glitch also possible on the DS version?
I also want to question, is destroying star gems and hypercubes slow? it seems that normal matching can destroy gems faster than these 2 special gems.
I was aware of this glitch. I tried it for a couple of times, but got no luck.
Star Gems and Hypercubes, as you can see on the video, show the animation of clearing the lines or specific gems and it's enough time-consuming to go with regular combos and Flame Gems, which occupy 3 columns to make gems above it jump and fall down. It's time-consuming as well, but you can swap gems in other places in the meantime.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Bejeweled 3 is not a really good game choice for TASing. For 2 reasons:
1) Entertainment. As we can see in this submission from 2012, it gets boring quickly. Yeah, this is one of the games which are entertaining when you play it, and not so entertaining when you watch a TAS.
2) Optimization. When you make a combo, a set of jewels, which falls from the top, is selected at random, depending on the time moment at which the combo was done. That means, each quest should be heavily bruteforced high and low in order to achieve your goals in the fastest time.
I'd say, optimization is the main restriction here.
Bejeweled 3 has not a big variety of goals. It has it's own set of achievements, but I don't think any of them, besides Levelord, worth its submission, as they are aimed at an extremely long play.
So, I would emphasize 2 reasonable goals: Levelord (short) and Quest Mode (long), which we'll focus on below.
Special Gems glossaryFlame Gem - collect 4 gems in a line. Blows 8 cells around it. All gems above the explosion jump up, but it's still the fastest interruption among special gems.
Star Gem - collect 5 gems forming an 90-degree angle: these are 4 variations of "L" and the "+" variation. Clears the whole row and the whole column which are traversed by the gem.
Hypercube - collect 5 gems in a line. Clears all gems of the kind a hypercube was swapped with.
Note: combining 2 hypercubes clears all the gems on the field.
Supernova - collect 6 gems in a line. Can be made only the game drops multiple gems from the top after you've made a combo. Provides the multiplied effect of a Flame Gem and a Start Gem, i.e. clears 3 rows and the 3 columns which are traversed by the gem.
Quest Mode
Quest mode consists of 40 stages, introducing 11 game modes.
Alchemy
Vertical combos cover columns. Horizontal ones cover rows. 8 matches on each line in 1 direction is enough to cover the whole field.
Things get a little complicated when you need to cover the field twice, but I think the strategy is still regular combos. Special gems are not that game changers here.
Avalanche
This mode is slow-pacing. Not much can be done here. Combos should be done during a fall of a gem line, to make them fall at the full speed. Making combos in other moments will pause the timer which drops a new line of gems.
It's possible to swap a gem with an empty space if there is no question mark above it.
Blowing a Star Gem at the end will save some time comparing to making 3-4 combos after the last needed line of gems.
Balance
It's about manipulating the frequency of red and blue gems. Don't let more than 3 columns be unsortable because, the more combos you do, the more gems fall down and red/blue ones are seen more often. Special gems are not that required.
Butterflies
Every time you make 1-2 combos, a random gem at the bottom turns into a butterfly and each combo makes it jump one space above, until it reaches the top.
It's about the frequency of combos to spawn more butterflies. It's not that hard to make combinations with them.
Gold Rush
The main problem is making combos at the bottom to break the ground cells. Blowing a Supernova, especially, near the bottom, is the fastest strategy. Well, a Star Gem along the line with gold cells is good too, but who knows if this will be faster than a Supernova.
Ice Storm
It's about making frequent combos and blowing Flame Gems because of their short interruptions.
Poker
Obviously, to get a Flush hand, you gotta rely on manipulations of the random. Say there are 3 available combos of the same color. You do these combos and make the game drop gems of the same color to do 2 more combos, resulting in having a Flush (5 of a kind).
Unfortunately, each your gem swap result gets recorded on one of 5 cards, so there are not much possibilities to prepare the field for the next set of cards without ruining your card combination. I don't think it's possible to collect constant Flushes (5 of a kind), but the rotation of Flushes and quads (4 of a kind) is definitely possible.
Also, combining a special gem gives you +50 points to the result.
Sandstorm / Buried Treasure
You gotta clear specific areas to pull the items out. The strategy is the same as in Ice Storm. It's about making frequent combos and blowing Flame Gems because of their short interruptions.
Stratamax
Since we have a limited number of moves, it's about manipulating cascade combos and blowing Flame Gems because of their short interruptions.
Time Bomb
You gotta make combos with specific gems with timers. 3-4 combos trigger a new bomb to drop down from the top. Not much to say. Flame Gems may come in handy.
Wall Blast
Flame Gems are not so useful here because they may not cover much of the wall blocks. Supernova is the fastest strategy because it covers much space.
I actually managed to make 2 hypercubes and join them to cover the whole field, but I think it's a slow strategy.
Jewels Random
The game drops new jewels at random for each of 8 columns which have less than 8 jewels after combining some of those. It also keeps track of total quantities of each color on the board, as well as the amount of possible combos, but it's not too restricted.
In rare cases, but easy enough to face it in a regular play, the game drops multiple jewels of the same color, making it easier for you to get powerful jewels.
In even more rare cases, you can get 5 (hypercube) or 6 (supernova) similar jewels in a row just dropped down for you. This is the main point of manipulation for the fastest strategy to complete some of the non-trivial goals.
In all modes, except Classic, the game doesn't let the player run out of combinations by always providing a set of jewels which make at least one combo possible. For a TAS, if you get into this situation, that definitely means you gotta replay a stage or rewind continuous playthrough to get a better random.
Here is my TAS which beats the Quest Mode. It's rather a low-effort run, cuz' I didn't bother beating each stage in the fastest time. A human may spend dozens of hours on each stage to get objectively fastest time, I think it's a work for a bot to mesh buttons.
Link to video
Here is the input file. I don't know why you'd need it, but anyway.
User movie #638173207203289282
I finished making a TAS today for beating 50% of the quests in Bejeweled 3. I'm not sure how known it is but I think it's possible to manipulate the game's luck a bit farther by purposefully making invalid matches at precise moments, causing the gem colors the game is about to drop to be rerolled (this manip doesn't seem to work all the time such as sometimes during ongoing combos, but otherwise it's pretty helpful). It's also possible to manipulate the luck of the starting gem board on each quest depending on the order you select levels in, which is especially helpful for levels that you want certain beneficial starting boards on (Balance quests starting with a lot of reds/blues, Stratamax quests starting out with more 4+ gem combos, etc). Still a pretty luck-based game overall, but with this manip and fast level routing overall I managed to get this run under 9 minutes.
File link:
User movie #638269707232963338
I finished making a TAS today for beating 50% of the quests in Bejeweled 3. I'm not sure how known it is but I think it's possible to manipulate the game's luck a bit farther by purposefully making invalid matches at precise moments, causing the gem colors the game is about to drop to be rerolled (this manip doesn't seem to work all the time such as sometimes during ongoing combos, but otherwise it's pretty helpful). It's also possible to manipulate the luck of the starting gem board on each quest depending on the order you select levels in, which is especially helpful for levels that you want certain beneficial starting boards on (Balance quests starting with a lot of reds/blues, Stratamax quests starting out with more 4+ gem combos, etc). Still a pretty luck-based game overall, but with this manip and fast level routing overall I managed to get this run under 9 minutes.
File link:
User movie #638269707232963338
I didn't expect anyone to contribute to beating this game. What a great improvement! 2,5 minutes ahead of my LOTAD.
I suspected invalid matches would affect the random, but I didn't dig much into it because my brief tests showed no effect.
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
I didn't expect anyone to contribute to beating this game. What a great improvement! 2,5 minutes ahead of my LOTAD.
I suspected invalid matches would affect the random, but I didn't dig much into it because my brief tests showed no effect.
Thank you :) and yeah, pretty unusual game to make a TAS of lmao. Found it interesting to create nonetheless
Finished a huge improvement to quest mode 100% today bringing it down to sub 20, was able to optimize a bunch with the main things being level routing and gemswap luck manip. Hope everyone enjoys
Link to video
