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Another Detour Blog
12th November 2022
Oh dear, we're going down a different path again!

-=-=-



Yesterday, over on SoCoder, Spinal suggested that the recent Five Words puzzle might make for a nice simple Wordle-Like site of its own, and within a few hours, I'd built up a brand new test game framework, because.. of course I did..!

You can See the current test here.
I'm going to be calling this engine Foldapuz-Play.
The current test lets you poke and tap letters and see them change colours.
It doesn't actually do anything gameplay wise, yet, but as far as a framework goes, I think it works reasonably well.

Things that the framework's doing.

1. NOT running continuously.
Unlike the other frameworks, this one stops and rests unless you're interacting with it. There's a "KeepAlive" that resets to 10 frames of activity every time you tap/poke/prod the thing, but otherwise it stops what it's doing and waits for the next bit of input.
I might have to expand that to about 30 frames, so I can use that time to check for completions and whatnot, but otherwise it'll help to keep the battery usage down significantly, when compared to Shoebox/Browsercade.
You can currently see this via the small flickering square in the top right. Once it stops, the game isn't doing anything at all.

2. The engine works upon a grid system, and this time (for a bloomin' change!) I've pre-coded the engine to work in terms of sections. The engine pre-prepares a section of the screen for "Main" and a "Remainder" section for other bits.
In the case of Five Words, the Main is where the letters are, and the Remainder for where it shows the words. But otherwise the two sections can be used for all manner of things, and "hopefully" the engine can scale however I need it to.
Little grid, Big remainder. Large grid, No remainder. And everything in-between. It's all easily doable with this new engine, and I think that's probably a good thing.
.. Maybe!!

3. Scales and resizes well enough to all manner of resolutions and ratios. Though I expect cramming big games onto a tiny mobile screen might still be an issue, so I'll be trying to stick to my own Foldapuz rules, in terms of keeping things big and chunky enough to be visible.

4. There's a button on the top right that switches between light mode and dark mode. This works well enough, though I think I need to expand that into a menu, to allow for high-contrast options, too.

Todo list.
1. I need to include menu functionality, quitting, completing a puzzle, and into-game and outof-game stuff, as well as saving, score displays, things like that.
2. Then games!!!

My intention here is to get the basics of the engine up and running by Dec01st, then using the Advent period to start making actual games for the thing.
Making good use of all those Foldapuz generators and, given that a whole lot of them tend to use grids, I think I can fling out these games in a fairly speedy manner, so .. Advent it is!
Though it most likely won't be every day!

... Damnit, Spinal!!!
Look what you've done to me!!!!!
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