Amazing how much a funeral hits you. I spent all day yesterday sitting about, playing Smash Bros, watching various YouTube things, and generally not really bothering to do any sort of coding whatsoever. Maybe today will be more productive?

Meanwhile..

Over on the Testing the Width post..

Alan suggests

Just my opinion, but the individual cards could use a tiny bit more margin. I prefer the top picture. Not because of the aspect ratio of the cards themselves, but because it has a...

OK, I think I'm done playing with the cards, for today!!! You can try the new cards in any of the Card Game games in the Shoebox.

^ My cards ^ Cards redrawn at "Proper" card sizes. I'm going to leave the cards at "My" size. Nothing against "proper" size, but .. Everything just looks a little bit cramped at that ratio! The extra width of my cards appears to give my eyes a little more focal space, and they seem to be able to cope a little better with a screen full of cards. Having said that, I did originally write the script with the ability to select from different card graphics. I haven't, so far, made use of t...

Testing cards, today, and .. I'm not happy with the landscape card. It feels too tall, and yet that's the same size I'm using for all my other cards. I don't want to have to redo all my card code, but.. At the same time.. Hmm.. Anyhoo, basic functionality of "Other Cards" is now in. I need to figure out a good way to implement all the different types of functionality that the cards will have, in a way that can be reused over various games. I'm thinking something like a coup...

After sitting and watching AI players play the game over and over and over again, I'm fairly confident that Ludo is now working enough to get a release. You can Play Ludo in the Shoebox, under the Board Games section

To take my mind off the horrors of "Jack Change It", I've instead decided to test another compiled edition of the game.

Our Four Competitors.. 1. An Acer something-or-other, cheaptastic, slow and horrible little thing. 2. Archos Gamepad 2 3. GPDxd 4. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10 A - 2018 model

I've tried to keep the "notifications" as subtle as I can, but .. obviously, they have to be noticeable! You can test them out in the Shoebox, by playing the Snakes and Ladders game!

Tried for the past few hours to see if I can get any vague "screen size" stuff to work.

So, I tried a whole bunch of vector art apps, last night..

Seems playable!! You can Play Shoebox of Games here, and you'll find Snakes and Ladders in the new "Board Games" section! Oooooh!!

If you're a frequent reloader of Shoebox of Games, you might've noticed the sounds of the cards being switched out, about half-a-dozen times, over the course of yesterday.

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.

So, time to add a board game.

@RSKGames

The fonts also might need to be changed to a pixel art font to make it look good. Early font-test prototype I coded this a few weeks ago, to see if web-fonts did actually work properly on as many browsers as I could find, and ... for the most part, they seemed to work just fine, meaning I can technically create my own pixel-style font, upload it to the server and have it work without too many issues.

During the course of making Shoebox of Games, I'm sure there'll be plenty of feedback. If you want to get a mention, you can send feedback either in the comments, via Twitter, via email, or any other method you can think of that includes me receiving the feedback! You can Play Shoebox of Games here.

I have to head off into town, today, to have a diabetes checkup.

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.

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

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'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 current gam...

I've added semi-persistent score handling to the Shoebox Framework, along with plenty of space to add a decent selection of scores and things into the mix. You can Test the Shoebox here!