It's Mother's Day, here in the UK, so today will be spent mostly not doing my normal thing of disappearing with code all day!
Today will, instead, be spent playing Scrabble.. Which I've conveniently gone and made a nice new App for playing with!
Incidentally, I also bought Mum the Super edition of Scrabble, which has twice as many letter tiles, and oodles more space to play within.
Yup, today's all planned out!

Might as well make this an official AGameAWeek release, eh?
This week's release isn't really a game. It's more of a Tool, or a Game-Companion!

Today I have to look into re-integrating the WordList functionality into Monkey for the purposes of the Scrabble Scoreboard I made yesterday.

Platdude's found a new light.
He's not sure what the point of it is, though.
Silly thing keeps turning itself off.

This is coming along rather well.
The scores are now all totting up, and everything's working to a moderately decent standard.
The game/tool's not very good at noticing gaps in word placements, so you could put down "Happy Cat" and it wouldn't notice the space.
That needs fixed.

Not sure where I'll be plonking this week's game, but I expect a quick
upload to the server in HTML5 format will probably suffice.
The basic layout is working, tile placement seems ok. There's a Cancel word button and a Enter Word button.
There's also undo functionality, which will be helpful when you accidentally hit the Enter Word button!! (Something that was incredibly frustrating in my previous attempt at this sort of thing.)
Next I need to go through all the di...

I love to play Scrabble.
Mum also loves to play Scrabble.
This coming Mother's Day (this Sunday) me and Mum will probably be spending some time playing Scrabble.

The gameplay now more or less functions for this week's game, and as far as puzzles go, it seems to be nice and complicated, without being too difficult to understand.
Todo List
1. Add a few more elements to make it a bit more interesting.
2. Decide on a decent way to generate tons of levels.

Flappadiddle-Doo and On A Space Shooting Trail are now both up on itch.io and GameJolt.
The itch.io collection doesn't seem to be too popular, right now, but it'll be interesting to see if interest grows as the collection does.
With GameJolt, there was a lot of excitement with my first couple of games, but then it all died down and went quiet.
Hopefully itch.io turns out to be the opposite?!

I *think* I've solved the online component of the framework, on Mac+Linux, now.
So, with the fix done, I've uploaded a new version of "On a Space Shooting Trail", which should hopefully work properly, now!
If you've Linux or Mac, be sure to let me know if it does or doesn't work! Be sure to "Enter Your Name" in the options menu.
For Windows folk, I've chopped the "Time until you can shoot again" right the way down to about 1 second. Should be much less frustrating, no...

The plan at 11pm was simple.
If I write tomorrow's SoCoder newsletter now, then I can wake up, post it quickly, and return to the coding!

I drew a biscuit, today! Hurray!
Looks like Bloke-Still-Without-A-Name wants a snack.
Hmm..
Still no progress on the Linux Online functionality. I can't find a fault in my code, and am now starting to wonder if it's actually VirtualBox which is causing the issue.
Will be trying it on the Mac, later.

I'm not really sure what direction this puzzle thing's going to take.
I've a single level idea in mind, but whether I can expand that to make more levels, I've no idea.

Today's attempts at the online fixings didn't work out.. Again!
I'm totally lost as to how to do that. Bah, humbug!
So, instead I started work on the next game.
I'm not 100% sure if this'll work out, but I'm aiming to make a sokoban-esque crate pushing puzzle game.
It might end up taking a couple of weeks, as I'll need to somehow come up with a nice way to generate levels. .. Or actually make them!!

With each release, the feedback is fed back, and I like to gather any important comments and post them into an easily accessible post.
This week's game is the lovely neon shooter, On a Space Shooting Trail

RSKGames

Last year I played one the NeonPlat games and marveled at the neon graphics style. This game has the same style but the way the looks is achieved seems to have matured a lot. Using the new framework some crafty blending techniques have been used to convert the simp...

Six years to the day that they found the great big tumour in my head.
In the time since, I've created over 130 games, built 3 different Frameworks including the recent C++ one, and drawn a heck of a lot of daily Pixelart doodles, tons of ALChoons, completely rewritten two fairly large websites, and a whole load more.
None of this would've been possible without the great Neurosurgery team up at Salford Royal, (specifically, Dr Leggate's team) and the wonders that are the British NHS.<...

The second game in the new C++ Framework is another familiar favourite, as we battle once again, in the neon skies.

According to what I've read online, I need to convert the socket to a non-blocking socket, then try to connect, and THEN (after trying to connect?!) tell it to set the timeout to a low number.

Today during testing, I hit a rather nasty issue with the framework.
When coding the Online Scoreboard component, I added a 5 second timeout to the code.
Unfortunately, as well as that works "in theory", the timeout is completely ignored during the "connect" part of the script.

So the shooty game (On a Space Shooting Trail) is near enough done.
Today I'll be needing to compile and upload, and then you'll get to play.
I know it's only Sunday, but there's no point in keeping the game to myself, when it's already ready for launch.
So, what's next then?
I've nothing specific in mind for this week, so if you'd like to see me tackle anything in particular, let me know in the comments.

Title by RSKGames!

Spent yesterday making the game look and feel as good as I could, but STILL haven't added any pickups!

Still need those pickups, Jay!

Spent about an hour cursing at Android again, last night.
"Hey, why not download out wonderful Android Studio, which makes everything a breeze!"
... Bah, humbug..

Player goes right, bullets are working, baddies appear, deaths and kills.
All is working well.

I seem to be making a new Horizontal Shooter.
Thus far, I've got bullets and a trail working, but I'm not sure if I'll be keeping the "Catch a bullet" mechanic of previous versions.

Each time I release a game, the thoughts and comments come rolling in.
Let's take a peek at this week's thoughts.

RSKGames

I find Flappadiddle Doo having the smooth gameplay like its predecessor and the polish found in ''Sheep Goes Right''.