There are now tabs along the bottom of the menu, when you're selecting a game, to let you quickly switch between the various sections of the site. The icons are reused as tabs, and are drawn with their bottoms chopped off, so they look better on the screen, and don't take up a giant chunk from the bottom of the menu. For the most-part, I've tried to make this part of the code easily tweakable, so that in future I can add extra sections. However, it might get a bit cramped if I do that...

I've shrunk the overall width of the menu buttons on Shoebox. For now, this means there's a little more space in the menu, to fit more games onscreen at once. Maybe later I'll try to add little tabs along the bottom, but .. for now.. SleepyJay is taking over!! Be sure to let me know what you think of the slightly modified buttons. Better, Worse or .. Kinda the same, Jay, you wasted hours doing naff all!!

I'm still not sure on the best layout for the frontend of the Shoebox. I do like the circular bubbly thing, but there seems to already be way too much scrolling with only 5 games in a section. Give me a year of working with this framework, and there'll be a lot more than 5! (Hopefully!) So, the frontend definitely needs a rethink, but I'm not really sure what kind of layout WOULD work for it all.

Record time for player feedback! Let's have a nosey. You can Play Shuffled Tracks in the Extras section of the Shoebox.

RSKGames

Played ''Shuffled Tracks'' and was quite surprised to find such a polished game done in 2 days. You'd be surprised.. ... The game was almost ready to go, yesterday!! Most of today's coding session was spent fixing up the generator to make the levels more difficult.

A simple enough little sliding-block puzzle game, with a train! You can Play Shuffled Tracks in the Extras Section of the Shoebox.

I've a couple of planned games to do that shouldn't take too long at all.

Let's go back over Alan's requests from this morning, shall we? You can play the recent upgrades in the Shoebox, v0.956. If it doesn't auto-refresh, hit the new [Cache] button on the top right of the main menu!

Alan

1. Place letters by click-to-pick-up-click-to-drop. I haven't got around to this bit, just yet. I need a rethink of how the mouse-tapping works.. It "should" be do-able, but it might be a little over sensitive.. (see #3)

If you enjoyed slaughtering poor AL in the Crossword game, yesterday, you might find him to be a teensy bit more challenging, now.

A nice big chunk of feedback from Alan this morning, on the new Crossword Game, so let's dig through his thoughts. You can Play the Crossword Game in the Shoebox under Word Games.

Alan

Fun. I beat AL 356-147 Yeah, AL's not hard to beat, right now! I need to get him to plan out Premium Tiles a little better, to bulk up his scores a bit.

For the sake of desperately trying to get a few extra sources of feedback, I've opted to upload a copy of Shoebox to GameJolt. .. And, thus far, there's zero interest.. So.. Yippee.. :/

Crossword Game v1 is now uploaded. You can Play Crossword Game in the Shoebox, where you'll find it under Word Games.

Someone should make a TV show where every single episode is big and epic, and definitely the absolutely final ever episode.. .. Until right at the end, when someone notices something, and it acts as a cliffhanger for the next episode.

I'm now having issues with the Swap Letters Dialogue, in that if you drag all your letters onto the dialogue and hit the "Swap" button, for a split second you have no letters in your rack, and the computer goes "Hey, somebody won!!" *sigh* Everything else from the earlier todo-list is now todone, so I'm pretty confident that the game will be out at some point today! Just .. Those last little bits!!

I'm down to the last few items on the todo-list. .. .. Wasn't I down to the last few items on the todo-list, a few days ago!? Hmm..

Little bugs all over, but definitely a productive day.

Right, today I need to figure out how to do the blanks. I'll probably need to use an extra chunk of array to draw them separate from the rest of the board. Draw plain blanks, then plop letters on top. I might even make them Font-based, rather than Tile-based.

*sigh* This really has been an effort to get everything into place!

1. The "Swap Letters" dialogue. A secondary rack that pops up and lets you move letters into the Swap-Rack, before hitting the "Yep, swap!" button and having them be swapped, whilst you miss a turn.

Having a really odd issue, right now, where computer players are sneakily gaining blank tiles, when.. A ) The computer player can't make a move. and B ) There are no blank tiles in the bag. They're just sneakily plucking blank tiles out of mid-air! Baffling!

Alan asks..

What's the general outline of your current approach? The general method is as such. 1. The AI randomly picks a spot on the board, and scans to check that a word will fit in the space provided. It looks for a space that will fit about 3 or 4 letters and will connect to at least one other tile on the board.

The AI is selecting some nice placements, as well as some fairly decent words, but there are still "quirks" in the methodology.

Massive enhancements, tonight, as the Crossword Game's brain gets a little shove in the right direction.

The AI is now at least managing to play without murdering my laptop! A quick rewrite of the WordList, and a little bit of learning a bit more of Javascript's abilities, and I've now got things streamlined a little more. The next will be to add a bit more intelligence to the AI. As you can see in the screenshot above, all four AI players seem to be fairly balanced, but aren't exactly scoring massively. That'll be the next task, now that things aren't insanely slow and, deadly to my ...

I might need to rejig the way the WordList is held, to make AL's job a little bit easier.

AL's getting slightly better, but is currently only attempting about 2 word placements per frame.