Guide Roland around the maze, using the many blocks to push his biscuits into an area he can eat them from.

I'm still not happy with the background for the Biscuit game. It's currently "Generic Starfield #1287894372", but I feel like I could possibly come up with something a bit more interesting. I'll be giving that a go, later.

Couldn't get to sleep, last night. The Level Layout grid was keeping me awake, as I considered how many alternative ways I could figure out the many possible sets of numbers.

After a bit of a chatter on this SoCoder thread, with help from Spinal and RSKGames, I eventually ended up with a spiral-based level selection. The main menu is now a big bunch of uninteresting looking squares. The middlemost square is initially unlocked, and as you complete levels, adjacent levels will unlock.

Yeah, the "After eating, go crazy!" stuff isn't working out. The two sections, puzzle vs arcade, are TOO different, and don't really work well together. Having it happen every single level just became repetitive, far too quickly.

SamuelAFalvoII on Twitter suggested something, yesterday. The biscuit game might be being tweaked as a result.

As I continue to tweak the level generator, I've somehow managed to get it to make a few rare 3-biscuit levels. They're incredibly few and far between, but every 100 or so generated levels brings a 3-biscuit level to the forefront.

Although I've now upgraded the level generator to handle more than 1 biscuit at a time, the maximum it seems to be able to make levels with is 2. After that, biscuits keep falling off the level, and the levels aren't completable. So, one or two biscuits at a time, but the levels are still kinda samey. Although the generator's coming up with nice and complex paths to get the biscuits, the end result is that you can complete the level much easier if you just ignore the complex path and do you...

What to add to the Biscuit game? Unsure of what else I can throw into the mix, I'm now instead considering just having a second and possibly third biscuit in the levels.

Tonight I worked on the level generator for the Biscuit Puzzler, and it seems to work reasonably well. The main problem now, is that with one biscuit in a grid of 5x5, the gameplay's more than a little repetitive. I'm going to have to see if I can come up with something a little more interesting to keep the game alive. As it stands, though, there's some fiendishly difficult puzzles coming out of the generator, and that's good to see Incide...

Last night I rejigged a lot of the Scrabble Scoreboard, and especially focused on the GUI a little. That Undo button still doesn't quite work, with it being tucked right at the top of the screen, but otherwise the new GUI looks a little more usable.

Had a nice long game of Super Scrabble against Mum, today, and the games last much longer, as expected! Took about 2 hours, or thereabout, before one of us had won*.

It's Mother's Day, here in the UK, so today will be spent mostly not doing my normal thing of disappearing with code all day! Today will, instead, be spent playing Scrabble.. Which I've conveniently gone and made a nice new App for playing with! Incidentally, I also bought Mum the Super edition of Scrabble, which has twice as many letter tiles, and oodles more space to play within. Yup, today's all planned out! See you tomorrow. And, Happy Mother's Day.

Might as well make this an official AGameAWeek release, eh? This week's release isn't really a game. It's more of a Tool, or a Game-Companion!

Today I have to look into re-integrating the WordList functionality into Monkey for the purposes of the Scrabble Scoreboard I made yesterday.

This is coming along rather well. The scores are now all totting up, and everything's working to a moderately decent standard. The game/tool's not very good at noticing gaps in word placements, so you could put down "Happy Cat" and it wouldn't notice the space. That needs fixed. But if you're playing along with a real-world board game, as is the intention with this, you can probably work around that slight flaw!!

I love to play Scrabble. Mum also loves to play Scrabble. This coming Mother's Day (this Sunday) me and Mum will probably be spending some time playing Scrabble.

The gameplay now more or less functions for this week's game, and as far as puzzles go, it seems to be nice and complicated, without being too difficult to understand. Todo List 1. Add a few more elements to make it a bit more interesting. 2. Decide on a decent way to generate tons of levels. 3. Ugh.. Menu.. URRRGHH!!! But, gameplay wise, it's looking good!

The plan at 11pm was simple. If I write tomorrow's SoCoder newsletter now, then I can wake up, post it quickly, and return to the coding!

I'm not really sure what direction this puzzle thing's going to take. I've a single level idea in mind, but whether I can expand that to make more levels, I've no idea.

With each release, the feedback is fed back, and I like to gather any important comments and post them into an easily accessible post. This week's game is the lovely neon shooter, On a Space Shooting Trail

RSKGames

Last year I played one the NeonPlat games and marveled at the neon graphics style. This game has the same style but the way the looks is achieved seems to have matured a lot. Using the new framework some crafty blending techniques have been used to convert the simple white s...

Six years to the day that they found the great big tumour in my head. In the time since, I've created over 130 games, built 3 different Frameworks including the recent C++ one, and drawn a heck of a lot of daily Pixelart doodles, tons of ALChoons, completely rewritten two fairly large websites, and a whole load more. None of this would've been possible without the great Neurosurgery team up at Salford Royal, (specifically, Dr Leggate's team) and the wonders that are the British NHS. Tha...

The second game in the new C++ Framework is another familiar favourite, as we battle once again, in the neon skies.

According to what I've read online, I need to convert the socket to a non-blocking socket, then try to connect, and THEN (after trying to connect?!) tell it to set the timeout to a low number.

Today during testing, I hit a rather nasty issue with the framework. When coding the Online Scoreboard component, I added a 5 second timeout to the code. Unfortunately, as well as that works "in theory", the timeout is completely ignored during the "connect" part of the script.