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!!

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.