Swap

About the game

Swap is played on a square grid seen from above. You control a blue circle, and the goal is to get it onto the green square. The twist is that there is usually more than one circle on the board, and pressing Space moves your control to the next one. The circle you leave behind does not simply wait: depending on the level it stands still, keeps walking in one direction, bounces between walls, follows you or turns at every obstacle. The circle you control is drawn in a strong blue, the others in a paler one.

Each level adds a new piece to the puzzle. Red tiles are deadly for whoever steps on them. Yellow tiles are switches that open the orange walls for as long as someone stands on them. Pale blue walls stop only the circle you are controlling, so sometimes the way through is to let another circle walk across and then swap into it. A short hint under the board introduces each idea, and later levels combine them, so that solving one means planning who goes where and when to swap, and sometimes acting fast before a wandering circle walks into the lava.

Noah Moroze and Michael Yang, two of the authors of Hextris, made Swap in 2013 for the GitHub Game Off, a month-long game jam held by GitHub. There are twenty-five short levels, from a simple walk to the goal to puzzles that take several tries.

Playing it here

Click Play, then press Space to close the welcome message. The page is scaled to fit the player. The counter at the top shows your deaths and the level number. The game does not save your progress: reloading the page starts again from the first level, and the Skip link moves on to the next level if you are stuck. The music is off at first; the speaker icon in the top corner turns it on.

This is the version the authors publish on GitHub, with the fonts served from this site and the share buttons and the GitHub ribbon removed. The game itself is unchanged. It needs a keyboard.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Watch first. Before moving, swap through every circle and watch how the others behave; each level tells you a lot in its first seconds.

Swapping is free. Space can be pressed as often as you like, even several times in a row to reach a circle further down the list.

Use the others. A circle you are not controlling can hold a switch down or walk through a pale blue wall for you.

Deaths do not matter. The counter only keeps score; dying just restarts the level.

Credits and licence

Swap was created by Noah Moroze and Michael Yang and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. The music is "2nd Ballad" by DeceasedSuperiorTechnician (CC BY 3.0). The game uses the Keypress library (Apache 2.0), Font Awesome (MIT and SIL Open Font License) and the Open Sans font (SIL Open Font License). The licence texts and the source code are linked from this page.