It's 7 years since I first posted the Jiggity post, waffling on about my health, and the tumour, and all of that gubbins. As is tradition, here's my annual health update post! Feel free to skip by this post, it's all about my crappy health issues, and since nothing's changed, you probably know it all anyway!

RSKGames returns with his thoughts on recent games. You can Play Shoebox of Games here, which are all Mouse/Touch controlled games, which run 100% in the browser. Or you can Play Browsercade here, which are all Keyboard/Gamepad controlled games, for a more Arcade-like experience, but which also run in your browser.

@RSKGames

Browsercade games

: The main menu or Homepage looks fantastic with each game having the name at the top in their own game themes.

Far too hot. Struggled to sleep, last night. Instead, I sat in the living room at 1:30, tapping away on my laptop.

The gradient background in the above screenshot has been drawn to a secondary canvas, which is then redrawn onto the main canvas. This seems to work reasonably well, and should hopefully allow for a fair number of generated backgrounds and other such effects, without requiring huge 1024x1024 background images to be downloaded. The whole thing runs a little slowly on my Samsung Galaxy 10 A, however, so I'm going to have to add an option to disable the buffer when necessary. But otherwise.. Yeah.. W...

It's gotten a teensy bit cooler, tonight, and I've been able to get some coding done! The "ingame GUI" for Space Battle isn't looking awful... And that's as good as you're going to get I might fix up that explosion graphic to make it a bit more "Stand out'y", but otherwise things are definitely a bit more playable. I've added "double tap" to the controls, like with Atoms. I think that's probably the best bet when dealing with t...

I've done an alarming amount of work on this GUI today, and .. *shrugs* Doesn't look any bloomin' different to how it did, this morning!!

Oh boy, was yesterday complicated!!

It's nothing too tricky, and you won't struggle to play it. The simple classic game of Hangman. Tap the letters, fill in the blanks, and try to guess the words or phrase. You can Play Hangman in the Shoebox where you'll find it in amongst the Word Games.

JMTrackr is a Music Randomisation engine, which can create an endless variety of music, based upon a set of prewritten melody patterns. If you've a Switch, and have downloaded SmileBASIC, you can grab a copy of the game using the Public Key...

4E3E33P5Y

I've gotten JMTracker up to a semi-working state, but still have to add test settings for things like Tempo and Instrument selection, as well as a proper Load requester. But so far, so good, and it's a vaguely decent output.. I think!! Although only a proper set of melodies and actual ingame usage will tell for sure..

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.

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.

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!!

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.

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)

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.

Little bugs all over, but definitely a productive day.

As the Shoebox continues to build, more and more and more comments are incoming! I've literally had more comments to the blog in the past couple of months than I have in the past decade!!

Alan

Olympic sprinters don't need to break the tape by exact footstep *imagines 100 Marathon sprinters stopped right at the end of a race, all trying to roll a 6 to win*

Seems my head wasn't quite ready to get back into an all-day coding session like I was aiming for.

Although only Cardagain currently has any "House Rules", I have at least decided on the best place to put them. The House Rules are fittingly inside the "Rules" section. Tap the little "?" in the top right, and alongside the actual rules, you'll see a little set of standard HTML Radio-Buttons which allow you to choose from the three available speeds of the game. This will be the place where all future House Rules will be going, so try to remember that, going forward!! As always, if you can think o...

Today I need to get a new scoreboard working in the Shoebox.

You know when you're at the end of the day, and do backups and things, and forget that you weren't quite yet finished doing the Player Selection Screen, but it accidentally gets uploaded anyway...? That!

I spent most of last night trying various microphone tweaks in order to get just the right sound.

The latest sounds have been added to the Shoebox framework, along with a bunch of tweaks to various games to account for the new sounds. In addition, I've now added a trashcan to the game selection screen, which will erase the scores for the selected game mode. Tap it on the bottom right, then tap again on the bottom left, to erase your scores. This is most useful when playing the two-player form of Four in-a Row, as you can reset whenever you need to.

I'll be trying to tweak the audio engine again, today, to see if I can do 0.25-second length sounds, and have them play on all the usual browser targets.

You can Play Shoebox of Games here Over the course of a couple of weeks, in February 2019, I began the creation of a small collection of JavaScript games. My aim is to, over the next few weeks/months, to slowly expand the number of games included in the pack, to create a lovely little collection of card games, word games, board games and more, all of which are playable within your browser.