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Crossword Feedback Blog
8th May 2019
A nice big chunk of feedback from Alan this morning, on the new Crossword Game, so let's dig through his thoughts.

You can Play the Crossword Game in the Shoebox under Word Games.

Alan

Fun. I beat AL 356-147


Yeah, AL's not hard to beat, right now! I need to get him to plan out Premium Tiles a little better, to bulk up his scores a bit.

-=-=-

My suggestions, feel free to disregard all of them


Will do!

1. Place letters by click-to-pick-up-click-to-drop.


AAARGGHH!!!!!

Right at the start of this project, I decided that I wanted the game to feel more like a "physical" game, rather than a "click, wait" computer game.
You lift up the piece, and you put it down where it should go, not a semi-automated clicking frenzy.
Click-To-Click tends to lead to "Lack of interaction", in my opinion, and then you end up with games that might as well be playing themselves, for all you're joining it.
It's bad enough that Snakes and Ladders practically does this. Your only interaction with that game is "click the little poppy-button thing" and that's about it.

But. ..
I suppose..
Maybe..

Nnngh...

I'll need to rewrite a chunk of the code for that to work properly, though, so. Might not happen right away.

2. Placing a letter on top of an existing letter (that you have provisionally placed this turn) replaces it.


Yeah, that makes sense. That's how it works in "Score Rack", so .. That should probably happen here, too.

3. Clicking a provisionally placed letter returns it to your rack.


See #1!

4. Blue letters on green background are a bit of an eye strain for me.


Yeah, agreed.. Eyes got a bit squinty last night, as I was trying to play.
I do like the Blue Letters, though, so I guess it's the green that I have to change.
I'll have a play, and see what comes of it.

5. Running table of words played w/score, maybe. Maybe that's overkill.


I was thinking about how to store that. I could easily plonk the words into one of the spare Grid arrays. Crossword only makes use of the primary array, not the spare Grid2, GridX, GridY, GridAX and GridAY arrays. (I left tons of space for all the various games I'm planning on making!!)
These all get saved, but have to be stored as numbers only, which isn't really a problem unless I have to deal with a LOT of words.. Then I might run out of space.

Also, what might be the best way to display them?
I was considering that tapping on the (up to 4) player box things might bring up that player's list of words? Or maybe just bring up everyones words for that?
*shrugs*
Experimenting!!!

Thanks for the input, and I'll have a look into click/tap play (Booo, hiss!!) and see where it leads.

You can Play the Crossword Game in the Shoebox under Word Games.
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