Nnngh.

-=-=-

I think I know what the game is trying to be, but it's really not very good!!!
The main issue, right now, is when all the spiked-balls end up rolling around the bottom of the map.
Maybe I can fix this by removing the bottom of the map..?
Seems the most sensible choice, but it's kinda tricky to not land on the bottom of the level, as you're also blowing up most of the level as you go.
What to do, what to do...?

Outage

In order to get the tilemap of the new game to draw to the BG Buffer, I had to do a little tweak to JSE.
In general, the tilemap will draw only the tiles that exist within the screen's resolution.
So, if you've a 256x256 tilemap, it only draws the small 16x16 area that will fit on the screen. Great for optimisationalism.
However, in this game, I needed to draw the whole tilemap to a larger BG Buffer (which then gets redraw to the screen, later)

This means the tilemap function needed to know the size of the BG Buffer before it could draw properly.
A quick tweak, and all was done, so i opened up the site uploader and uploaded the updated version of JSE to the site.
...
Or did I!?!

A few hours later, Michael Fernie emailed to let me know that the whole of AGameAWeek was malfunctioning.
Oops!!

Lesson learned : Be careful not to upload to the wrong folder!
JSE's index.html was now overriding what should've been AGameAWeek's index.php!
A quick delete + re-upload was enough to get things working again.

Thanks, Michael for the tip-off.
I'm sure I'd've noticed, eventually, but it just goes to show how focused I can get sometimes, when I'm knee-deep in the code!!

Meanwhile...

Over in the land of SmileBASIC 4 on Switch 2, I've started building a new framework, and am thinking through the plan of action to get the next 150 games running on there.
I'm currently thinking some sort of collection, instead of having each game be its own download. The 150 games I've previously made are all lovely to have, but .. good grief it got messy after.. ... What.. 3?!

So, one download, one collection, keep it simple, but build it up. (SmileBASIC has a "update" function, so people can easily check for the latest version)

I guess that means that it'll end up being a bit like Browsercade. (Hey, wasn't I supposed to be updating that?!!)

But it got me thinking. What can I do to make it feel a little more substantial?
And that's when the idea of Daily Games popped into my head.

What if, every single game has pseudo random generation (which all my games tend to do, anyway) and every day, the engine picks "today's game"..
You can still play the collection, but there'll be a predetermined "Game of The Day" with a pseudo-random level/whatever to play.

That might work, there, right?
Should I do something similar for Browsercade, too?
Would that work ok?
Hmmm..

A.I. Corner

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