Far too hot. Struggled to sleep, last night. Instead, I sat in the living room at 1:30, tapping away on my laptop.

Time to connect the hexes! Grab a hex from the side, and smash it into alike-coloured hexes, to make them all disappear. If you've a Switch, and have downloaded SmileBASIC, you can grab a copy of the game using the Public Key...

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Lots of little things to do, today. This week's SoCoder Newsletter needs oodles of waffle in it, since the forum's been understandably quiet. It's too hot to stare at a forum, all day!! I also need to upload this week's ALChoon, and I haven't yet attempted to do a .XM of it. Hmm..

I've had to add a limit to how many hexes I'm drawing on the Petit-Switch screen at once!!

Over on the Switch, I'm reproducing a basic version of Clusters of Hex, and .. .. Oh boy, had I forgotten how much of a pain it was to code this thing in the first place!

Alan suggests

Looks pretty good. I did spot a slight half-pixel seam where the background wraps around. I like the parallax effect, though. I've cheat-fixed that for the meantime, by simply wrapping the buffer a single pixel closer to itself, but it might look more glitchy once I start doing different types of backgrounds. I need to add a "sprite to buffer" function, to check that, though. Other tweaks.. I've made the "Logo on a plain screen, waiting for the first click" screen a...

1. People seem utterly baffled by the start-screen of Browsercade. I put that there, because a lot of browsers need a single click before they initiate any audio, but seemingly people are instead "waiting" for it, and think the thing's broken. D'oh!!

This week's game sees you trying to place the cards in such a manner that all rows and columns add up to 21. The game should be fairly easy to solve, as long as you remember the card values. Jack, Queen and King are all worth 10. Aces can be either 1 or 11. You can Play Pontoon Grid here, or wait for it to show up in your regularly scheduled puzzle sheet.

.. When you're awake late at night, and think to yourself "This will give me ample time, tomorrow, to do all the other things!"

As I was drifting off to sleep, my mind was racing for a decent Foldapuz concept for the week. I thought about cards, and considered a grid of 5x5 cards.

In order to properly test my onscreen touch controls, I'm going to need some kind of quick playable game, so that's going to be today's task. Something short and simple, but complex enough to really put the controls to the test.

After I release more and more games, player's try desperately to keep up! Let's see what RSKGames thinks of today's Shoebox addition. You can Play Grid of Conquest in the Shoebox, under the Group Games section.

@RSKGames

''Grid of Conquest'' immediately reminded me of ''Might of the Balls'' which was incidentally made almost on a similar date last year ''23rd July, 2018''. Oh yeah! I'd actually forgotten about that game.

Try to fill up as much of the board in your colour as you can. Normally you can't move over opponent's tiles, but if you earn a 6, you're allowed to move wherever you'd like. There are additional green spots on the board. Reach these for a couple of extra points. You can Play Grid of Conquest in the Shoebox of Games under the Group Games section.

I spent last night rewriting my Pseudo Random code so that it works nicely in Javascript, for both Browsercade and Shoebox.

This project was titled "Power Source" when I started it, but the name doesn't fit the end result, so I'm going to have to change it.

I don't think I'll be getting "Game with balls" up and running within the next day-and-a-half or so, so instead, I'll make something completely different!! But what game to make?

Welcome to a mini-deathmatch scenario. It's just you and the aliens, in this classic twin-stick shooter. How long will you survive? If you've a Switch, and have downloaded SmileBASIC, you can grab a copy of the game using the Public Key...

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Things I need to do, today. 1. Post morning Blog+Pixelart 2. Socoder Newsletter 3. ALChoon 4. Finish off Alien "something" for Petit Switch 5. Go for a health assessment in the middle of town.. Ugh.. Not looking forward to this one. ..

Lots of things to finish off, today, and not a lot of time to do it. Tomorrow's another trip into town for another assessment, and that'll take away a lot of my regular Thursday "finishing things off" time, so .. Today's the day for that!!

My Petit-Switch engine runs with nothing more than 16x16 pixel sprites, so if I'm going to create any form of Alien Deathmatch on there, I'm going to first have to redraw all the sprites.

- I'm fairly content with how the touch controls seem to be working, now, and they're apparently functional on both iPad Wide and iPhone Tall displays. The DPad can be a teensy bit large on iPad Tall, though, so I might yet still make an optional thumbstick mode instead. Simple testing has been done on the menus, but "real world" testing won't be happening until there's a "real world" game to test it with. .. I'd better get onto that, huh?

A simple maths game, this week. The solutions are already there, but what equations make up the solutions? The nine boxes should be filled with the numbers 1 through 9, such that the results are accurate. You can Play Cross Sums here, or wait for it to show up in the daily Foldapuz sheets.

1. I have a Foldapuz game to write! 2. Get back to doing those Touchscreen Controls for Browsercade. That's enough for today.

Blandness has enveloped much of the site! The complete Shoebox and Foldapuz collection are now added to the Archive, and that's how things are going to look, moving ahead. In the coming weeks (hopefully!!) I'll be starting to add Browsercade games into the mix, too, so things should begin to get a bit more interesting to look at, but as I transition from making downloads to generating everything via Javascript, there's always going to be that bit where things get a bit .. .. Boring and web-...

You might've noticed the top-bar of Recent Games is currently (slowly!) changing. I've decided it's probably a good idea to start adding Foldapuz and Shoebox games in, with the intention of further adding Browsercade games to the archive once that's up and running.

Alan Suggests

There's always VirtualBox for a retro dev environment, although that doesn't make it easier to find the old versions of the dev kits.

Blackjack, Pontoon, 21. Call it what you will. The aim is to reach as close as you can to 21, without going over. Once you're done, AL will have a try, and whoever gets closest is the winner. The first to reach three wins is declared the overall winner of the game. You can Play Blackjack in the Card Games section of the Shoebox.