Pepitautomat in Unity Engine
After I had to remove the old version because Adobe Flash was no longer supported, I ported the game to CREY, and even added 15 extra levels where you have to make the board match an image. But then CREY got shut down too, so now I ported it to Unity WebGL, because that's what I was learning for my next job. Let's hope this one will last this time :'D
Since it runs in the web browser, it means it works on all major PC platforms, and even on mobile devices. Although, mobile browsers are not officially supported by Unity, but they seem to work fine nonetheless.
I designed the UI with mobile devices in mind, the game adjusts to both portrait and landscape mode, and has big enough buttons to be pushed on touch screens. I even added another 16 levels, so now there are 32 in total.
Screenshot gallery. Click on any image to enlarge it.
The web build is 18 MB big, which is not ideal, but unfortunately that's the overhead necessary for the web player. Ideally, I should just port this game to native JavaScript and HTML, but the truth is, I'm just using this game as a sort of "Hello World" app whenever I learn something new. I have no desire to implement it in anything I'm already familiar with.
How to play
The original game was just one level, where you had to turn the whole checkerboard into one single color. Later I realized that it's also possible to have all kinds of interesting shapes, and have that as a goal, making the game much more interesting, and longer.
To manipulate the checkerboard, you need to press the buttons at the lattice points. This will invert the color of the 4 neighboring tiles. You gain a ⭐ for completing levels, and an extra ⭐ for completing them in the minimum number of steps. Every ⭐ unlocks one level.
What is a "pepita" anyway?
You might be wondering what the heck is a "pepita-automat". Pepita is the Hungarian word for the checkerboard or chessboard pattern, named after the Spanish dancer Pepita de Ortega, who went on a world tour in the 19th century while wearing a scarf featuring such pattern. It's funny, considering we do also have the term "chessboard-pattern".
As for the game itself, the first level where you have to clear the board in 24 steps, it was from an article in a Hungarian science magazine called "Life and Science" (Élet és Tudomány). I took the name from that article. It's so unique that the only results Google gives are my game and that article. I feel like credits are due for someone here, but unfortunately the online version of the article is behind a paywall, and I no longer have the printed version, so...