Don't worry, I didn't completely abandon the Shoebox!!

After a LOT of edit/undo, copy/paste, delete/delete work, I think I've found a style of graphics that works for the furniture of the game.

Today will be about redrawing furniture to suit the slightly new style of The Quest, or rather so all the furniture doesn't look oddly out of place!

2005 was a long long time ago, so the Quest-Qrew have been given a slight makeover.

Geeze, these are old!!

As I plough ahead without too much of a plan, I'm having to make a lot of quick decisions along the way.

Heavy decade-old Sprite Reuse, ahoy! Those doors look dumb.. I really need to rethink how I'm going to draw the doors. Hmmm. However, it doesn't look "awful", and I think that's ok! I'll probably spend the next few days trying to get "just" the right style for the doors. Big enough that it looks like a nice big door, but small enough that it doesn't overlap the players when they're on the square "behind" the door. Tricky to get these things just right, and I might yet wimp...

And so, the Quest begins.

I've added "Laps" to Mancala in the ShoeBox, but ... crikey, is it hard to keep track of! AL is utterly baffled by this new style of play, so don't expect him to be a great challenge. If I can find a good method of play, I'll work that into AL's brain, but for the minute, he's a bit dumb in this mode. .. To be fair, so am I, and the Laps mode ends up being a game of Pot Luck! You can Play Mancala in the Shoebox, in the "One on One" section. The Laps setting is in the Rules.

I should really finish off Mancala's "Laps" stuff. I think that's probably going to be today's task. But after that, what game comes next?

A smallish, but needed improvement to ALs Mancala abilities. Players of v0.9858 should find that ALs a little bit smarter, targeting your possible captures, as well as aiming for his Mancala pot a little better. It's not "much" of a change, but he is a bit harder. I've not yet added Laps into the mix! Maybe tomorrow?

Crikey, RSKGames has already sent his Player Thoughts.. Guess I'd better hurry up and get those last few tweaks in place..

@RSKGames

I have never played this game before so it was fresh and fun for me. After 2 defeats and some reading of the rules I got the hang of it and was able to beat the AI few times.

Mancala is now in the Shoebox! You can Play Mancala in the "One On One" section of the Shoebox.

Spent a couple of hours, late last night, trying to find the best rules to give AL when playing Mancala.

Mancala's coming along nicely, now. I think!! All the Landing rules seem to be working, and the game-end stuff is also functional, but AL's still not very good at the game, so a little more work on AL is needed. But, definitely getting there! *phew*

The seeds (gems in this case) of Mancala are now managing to complete a full circle!

I might need to do some extra work on the menus.

I asked @CraigGrannell last night if the "swoopy" menus were a bit too much for his motion sickness issues, and he replied that it was.. For me, a bit, yeah. I thought as much when I added those Tap Swoopy things, but it's good to get a little confirmation.

A simple crossword clone, with a slightly different scoring mechanism. You can Play Crossword Golf in the Shoebox, next to the standard Crosswords game, in the Word games!

Alan Suggests..

While I'm thinking about it, one nice-to-have feature for Crossword Game would be ''shuffle my rack''. Sure, ok, why not!

Not really a game, but if I'm going to make this collection, you just know that this has to go in. You can Find Score My Words in the Shoebox, in the Extras section.

I've sorted out RSKGames' menu scrolling issue.. .. I think.. But obviously will depend on many "browsers aren't exact" issues. Be sure to let me know if it's ok for you.

RSKGames says..

The animation of the icons on transition from main menu to sub menu and back looks cool. Except the board games sub menu in all other sub menus the first row icons are way over the top such that half the icon is hidden above. Took me a while to figure out exactly what he meant, as the exact number of onscreen icons relies on all sorts of screen resolution gubbins.. .. But..

A couple of tweaks to the engine before I move on into other Crossword based things. 1. I've finally got the "Score value bubble" looking a little more like a bubble, and showing up at the end of words instead of seemingly at random! 2. Tap to Play "should" now work, but is still a small threshold of "tap". I might have to add the threshold into the option screen.. .. If I ever bother to make an option screen!!