Shifting elements in match3 kind of game

I am a beginner at ActionScript3, and for my learning purpose, I am trying to build a match3 kind of game. I am making is a clone of bejeweled kind of game. but instead of swapping, I have to delete those elements and shift the upper elements down and add new elements above those shifted elements.

I am abl开发者_如何转开发e to delete matched elements and after matching I'm removing those elements but I am stuck with the shifting code. I am not able to shift those elements down.

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I believe that you should take a look at Richard Lord's Tetris source code as your game may be somehow similar in mechanics to Tetris. Tetris shifts down rows when you get lucky.

Richard Lord is one of the Flash Gurus and his way of doing things may seem pretty advanced for a starter like you. Take a look over the source code and see if it fits you. What I can tell is that this is the proper way to make a game but maybe it's not the best point to start for a novice like you that is in urgent need.

http://www.richardlord.net/blog/actionscript-3-tetris-source-code

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I would approach it like this in 2 parts.

1. Loop through your array of board positions starting from the bottom row and check for an empty unoccupied slot, if you find one do another loop through the row above till you find a piece on the same column. If you find a piece on the row above apply a tween to move it down to the empty slot and continue your loop.

2. Once you have looped through all rows, and animated all the tweens you need to loop through again to find all the gaps that need gems dropped into them. Create new elements at those positions and then move them up by (element height * row), apply another tween to animate them back to their starting position.