Had another "This game isn't possible" email, this morning, about the blocking of the Draw Pile in Spider Solitaire. On the one hand, I guess I need to add a little more ingame, onscreen instructional stuff. On the other hand.. People just want Klondike, don't they!!! So that'll be today's task. Spend a few hours trying to replicate the "classic" solitaire, and see how easy it is to get it working, without needing to rewrite too much of the overall engine. (And preferably fix t...

Right, I'm probably going to ignore the audio issue, and plough ahead regardless. The audio tweaks can be made in the future. After all, this engine is 100% javascript, so everything is really easy to tweak afterwards, unlike most of my normal games that require recompiling and reuploading and then the player to realise there's an update, and redownload it.

Today I need to start getting the rules of Spider Solitaire to work, but as always will be looking for ways to reuse this code for all the future games.

I've added JNKsg's Multi-Loader functionality into Shoebox. You can Test it here.*

Taking a significant chunk of the Foldapuz/Unfolded, and JNKsg code as the basis, I've managed to get a fairly decent drawing engine up and running. Text, Ovals, Rects, Lines, Plot, and the all important DrawImg are all in, and functioning as expected, albeit without any recolouring for DrawImg. (Since I'm using basic Javascript and HTML5, I'm forfeitting the ability to recolour my sprites)

Yesterday I got an email with an idea for a game. A "simple" card game that could work fairly well.

OK, the engine's now at about 75%. The opponent AI isn't quite right, and needs a little extra tweaking, but for the most part the actual logic of the game is in place.

Didn't get an awful lot of coding done, yesterday. My mind was unsure whether to make the Chess game into a puzzle or an action game, and it was as though that decision clogged up my mind to the point where I didn't actually do anything at all!!

The Puzzobomb ProcGen isn't going very well. The levels are working, but they're not very hard at all. No matter what I try, I can't seem to find a good way to make some proper puzzles. Hmm..

Palettes are vaguely integrated into the engine. For the meantime, the palette simply forces any colour drawing to be selected from within a selection of predetermined colours. Due to the way JavaScript's canvas drawing works, the effect isn't 100%, with all manner of anti-aliasing getting in the way of things. A better option would be to draw the spritesheet, then do a second pass, forcing each individual pixel to be from the chosen palette. .. Another day, perhaps. Meanwhile, I'...

Spent a good couple of hours on one tiny little task, yesterday!

With only a few days of Advent remaining, it's time to think ahead for future plans.

Added Multi Box, a grid of numbers and their products. Simply decide which numbers don't belong in the grid and cross them out. There should be 3 numbers in each row and column, along with their product. The number of puzzles in the engine is now reaching a point where each of the categories can have it's own set of puzzles on the default sheet. No longer does the default Maths sheet contain a few Word games, and Word sheets don't have random Logic puzzles in them. There's still the o...

I spent about 80% of yesterday choosing a font!

I spent a couple of hours yesterday working up a new Platform Generator for the Sprite-Gen doohickey.

Got enough things to keep up with, there, Jay? No? How about another lengthy never-ending project?!

And we're already halfway through!!

Switched to using a TTF font instead of PHP's default rubbish font. Source Code Pro ..Which 1001fonts.com says is free to use, so if it isn't, blame them!

Oh dear..

Another 4 levels of JNKPlat were made, yesterday. Nice and big proper levels that should take a few minutes to solve, assuming you manage them in the right order!

The level select menu is almost up to a usable state.

Don't expect much, it's just a retread of Quadoban, with nothing new added into the mix other than the levels!!

Amazing what a little hand-made data compression can do!!

The Test button is now on the top left, next to the save button. The tile-menu is now on the bottom left instead of the right, leaving quite a gap on the bottom right of the screen. I might need to tweak that a bit!

I spent FAR too long playing with the door/exit swirly thing, yesterday, and even after all that time, I'm still not quite happy with the results.