Alan Suggests

There's always VirtualBox for a retro dev environment, although that doesn't make it easier to find the old versions of the dev kits.

Blackjack, Pontoon, 21. Call it what you will. The aim is to reach as close as you can to 21, without going over. Once you're done, AL will have a try, and whoever gets closest is the winner. The first to reach three wins is declared the overall winner of the game. You can Play Blackjack in the Card Games section of the Shoebox.

Started to make some progress with Touchscreen Controls, for Browsercade, today. The hard part was getting this button to work..

Sifting through my giant todo list, I came across "Try out Electron", so I've done that, this morning.. After about half an hour of waiting for various things to install, and then running them, the result was actually really quite nice and fluid, and looked good. I ran the electron-packer, and .. crikey, that takes a while, doesn't it.. Eventually, I ended up with what can only be described as "A folder", in which there were several million files all scrawled all over the place, including sever...

I honestly can't fathom why Firefox's cache isn't doing what it's supposed to.

This week, NeonPlat makes its way to the Switch! Throw your balls at the bats, and colour all of the plats! If you've a Switch, and have downloaded SmileBASIC, you can grab a copy of the game using the Public Key...

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It's the little things.. Like how the game isn't saving highscores, and the onscreen scores aren't quite readable enough, and the music doesn't end during the game-over screen, and .. The little things.. Still haven't actually coded the game, yet, either! This is all Framework stuff. Of course.. There's still one big issue to tackle..

Allen writes.. Not sure if you still develop for OUYA but I play all of your games on there and I had a game idea that I wanted to share with you. Oh, how I miss the OUYA.

Thought.. "Why is Browsercade not working in Firefox?" Further Thought.. "It SHOULD work.. Shoebox works, and it's practically the same script.." Further thought.. "Uhoh..!!"

I think, today, I'm going to focus on getting the final Framework touches of Browsercade done. Step One will be working out how plausible buffer-drawing is, whilst in a html canvas.

Step one, design (and/or copy+paste from previous editions!) a logo and icon for the game. Step two, start writing game. Step three, realise I'm a long way from being ready to start writing the game!!

The traditional Word Wheel. Try to find as many anagrams as you can, ensuring that each word contains the central letter. There's one complete word in the wheel. Can you find it? You can Try out Word Wheel here or wait for it to show up in regular Foldapuz selections.

I was almost certain I was near the end of the Browsercade Framework, but .. Nope.. There are still things to do!

As each game is released, players like RSKGames and <insert name here> send oodles of feedback for about the game. Let's see how they all thought about Dots and Squares! You can Play Dots and Squares in the Shoebox in the One on One section.

@RSKGames

Playing in the mobile, I find that sometimes I connect the wrong dots but in PC with mouse it works fine.

I *think* I'm almost ready to start coding my first Browsercade game.

The good old game that you used to secretly play at the back of the classroom! You can Play Dots and Squares in the Shoebox, in the One On One area.

I managed to rewrite most of my little PetitSwitch Sprite Editor, yesterday, but there's still a few missing features that need reintegrated. Though, if I'm honest, I never actually used those features.. So I might be lazy and say "Job Done"!

Petit Switch is mostly faultless, but there's one slight quirk that tripped me up, yesterday. When you save your code, you hit Ctrl+S, then it flashes up "Are you sure you want to save 'Project/main.prg'?" and then you hit OK, and it says "Are you REALLY sure you want to save 'Project/main.prg?'", and then you hit OK and then it saves.

Don't think of this as Pong. It isn't Pong. It's NOT Pong! If you've a Switch, and have downloaded SmileBASIC, you can grab a copy of the game using the Public Key...

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1. Not Pong is going to be my game for Petit Switch, this week. 2. Dots and Squares will be this week's Shoebox game. Todo-List. For Not Pong, I need to add a decent amount of sparkle and loveliness, but the basic gameplay's up and running. Dots and Squares needs a better AL-AI. He's currently only looking at each square on it's own, so often says "This square only has one line, I'll add a line", but is inadvertently placing that line at a point that makes a third line on ...

1. Finish off this week's Petit Switch game. (Not Pong) 2. Get started on a Shoebox game. (Unknown!) 3. Try to figure out the mod-pausing issue in Browsercade. 4. Post the week's SoCoder Newsletter. 5. Post the week's ALChoon, which also requires setting up a new ALBum page. I hate Thursdays!!

Looks much better!! I'm now struggling with pausing the music when you alt+tab, or otherwise multitask away from the browser. I seem to have got it working on iPad Safari (which is alarmingly unusual!) and Firefox, but not in Chrome or Edge. The Pause screen's coming up, but the pause command doesn't appear to be triggering the pause event in the mod player. Bit odd, but I think I've probably confounded my own code a bit, so will be double checking everything to be sure. But, yeah, ...

Taking the options menu directly from Shoebox, and shoving it into Browsercade, it becomes instantly noticeable how much better the thing looks when you add an icon or two. ... .. or even just one!

After each week's release, players submit their thoughts on the games. Let's have a look and see what @RSKGames thought of Space Battle! You can Play Space Battle in the One-On-One section of the Shoebox.

@RSKGames

Played Space battles for some time and thanks to a lenient AI I was able to win most of the times.

Watch me fumble my way through the Shoebox, in this brand new Shoebox of Games Youtube Playlist!! That's taken about 4 hours in total.. Capturing, uploading, editing the info, then dumping them all into a playlist. This probably isn't all that interesting, if I'm honest, but I figured it was about time I started making basic, regular use of my Youtube channel.

I've dumped a bunch of videos on YouTube for the PetitSwitch games. I've set up a Petit Switch playlist, and am going to attempt to keep to that with future releases. But what of everything else?

In this game, each square's value is the distance from Square Zero, counting steps towards the target. Try your best to triangulate the approximate position of the target square. You can Play Far Away here, or simply wait for it to show up in amongst the daily Foldapuz selection.