Spent an hour or two testing various enhancements to the FPS stuff, and I think I managed to find a nice middleground that seems to run fairly well.

I should probably try to finish off Blockman in the Browsercade, today, but I'm slightly worried that there's a teensy bit of slowdown in the engine, so I think today's plan should probably be to track that down.

Line up all 9 cards inside the grid so that each row and column add up to 21. The game uses Pontoon/Blackjack scoring rules, so Jacks, Queens and Kings are each worth 10, and Aces can count as either 1 or 11. You can Play Pontoon Grid in the Shoebox under the Misc games.

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!!

The gradient background in the above screenshot has been drawn to a secondary canvas, which is then redrawn onto the main canvas. This seems to work reasonably well, and should hopefully allow for a fair number of generated backgrounds and other such effects, without requiring huge 1024x1024 background images to be downloaded. The whole thing runs a little slowly on my Samsung Galaxy 10 A, however, so I'm going to have to add an option to disable the buffer when necessary. But otherwise.. Yeah.. W...

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!"

Alan suggests

The fact that the die is white at the beginning of your turn, and also white after you roll makes it unclear at a glance whether the die's current value is your actual move. Not sure what the solution is. Maybe dimming the die or displaying question marks on its faces in pre-roll mode, and the normal white with pips in post-roll mode? A valid point. The "Popomatic" function has a "Locked/Unlocked" value, so I can use that to decide when to draw v1 or v2. I'll have a pl...

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...

444XEP3HD

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!!

Yesterday I was playing with Alien sprites. Today, I've been playing with Balls! First off, don't get too excited! This is currently only a simple physics test, and is in no way representative of the end result! I'm actually aiming for a completely different game, first, but figured I might as well test the physics whilst I'm here. So far, so good, although the physics are occasionally a little bit glitchy. But.. .. Yeah, works fine!!

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?