The classic "hop over to remove" solitaire game is now part of the Shoebox.

It's a simple enough game. Leap either horizontally or vertically over another counter, to remove it from the board.
Your task is to remove all but one counter from the board.

As the board game engine slowly builds (really bloomin' slowly, this has been one heck of a challenge!!) I can now move "pieces" in and around the board.
It currently isn't a lot, and there's little or no rules, but it is at least functional.
Now to figure out why the whole thing scrolls so slowly at certain points.. Hmmm...

Today I'll be tackling the actual functionality of the new Board functions.

I'm now fairly happy with the way the generic board is scrolling and zooming on my iPhings, but the desktop version needs a lot more work.

I've started work on a universal board-drawing function that should hopefully allow me to add a number of different board games into Shoebox.

Did you notice the change in the Letter Bubbles, yesterday?
I bet you didn't!!

And so, I spent most of the day working on Particles..

Last night, I spent an alarming amount of time thinking about Particles.

You know that thing where you click on clusters of coloured objects, to earn points, and try to remove all the objects...?
That's now in the ShoeBox. (Under Extras)

It's a simple enough game, but it's made me realise there's certain things lacking from the ShoeBox Framework, like Score Popups, and lovely particles and things.

First up, I've decided to just let "Trails" be "Trails", and stop worrying about what the actual game might possibly have really been.

Shoebox has been limited to a 30fps mode, simply because initial tests showed my crappy laptop to suck at trying to run it at 60fps, and the fan kicks into gear!

I added another Solitaire game to the Shoebox, last night, but it was entirely from memory, and my memory's starting to fade!!

I've spent the past hour or so tweaking the "failed to load" functionality of the ShoeBox, and I *think* I've managed to get it to fail well, although.. Honestly, I won't know for sure until something does in fact break, and unlike most scenarios, I can't think of a quick and easy way to test this one!
If you see a dead shoebox, be sure to let me know!
Rest assured, however, that when it does now happen, a reset should no longer erase all of your Win/Play scores, just your curre...

RSKGames emailed, this morning, with a log file showing what happened in his browser, when the ShoeBox collection failed to load properly.

Managed to get a little bit of coding done, today.
I've added a fairly swift anagram-finder to the word engine of Shoebox. The script can more or less search anagrams for about two sets of letters each second, so should be fairly useable once I start making a "generic unbranded crossword style word game" game.
The next part of that particular puzzle is trying to decide on scores for tiles.
Do I stick with "Stringy Things" tile scores, which they currently are in the game, or do I swit...

I did a few tweaks to the framework, yesterday.
There's now a mute button in the pause/escape menu, which works.. (For a few hours, it was there, but did absolutely nothing!!)

Michael emailed, late last night, to complain about the scaling on one of the games.
"No," thought I, "That should be working fine.."

It's hard to keep from breaking things when they're already live on the server.

With extreme apologies, I've just deleted everyone's highscores in Shoebox! (Don't lynch me!!)

... But is it actually better?!

I posted Klondike late last night, then grabbed the iPad, and settled back to play for a short while.
.. Uhoh!!

What should've been doable within a few short hours, ended up taking most of the day.

You can Play Klondike in the Shoebox of Games!

Had another "This game isn't possible" email, this morning, about the blocking of the Draw Pile in Spider Solitaire.
On the one hand, I guess I need to add a little more ingame, onscreen instructional stuff.
On the other hand.. People just want Klondike, don't they!!!