For the sake of desperately trying to get a few extra sources of feedback, I've opted to upload a copy of Shoebox to GameJolt. .. And, thus far, there's zero interest.. So.. Yippee.. :/

Crossword Game v1 is now uploaded. You can Play Crossword Game in the Shoebox, where you'll find it under Word Games.

Someone should make a TV show where every single episode is big and epic, and definitely the absolutely final ever episode.. .. Until right at the end, when someone notices something, and it acts as a cliffhanger for the next episode.

I'm now having issues with the Swap Letters Dialogue, in that if you drag all your letters onto the dialogue and hit the "Swap" button, for a split second you have no letters in your rack, and the computer goes "Hey, somebody won!!" *sigh* Everything else from the earlier todo-list is now todone, so I'm pretty confident that the game will be out at some point today! Just .. Those last little bits!!

I'm down to the last few items on the todo-list. .. .. Wasn't I down to the last few items on the todo-list, a few days ago!? Hmm..

Little bugs all over, but definitely a productive day.

Right, today I need to figure out how to do the blanks. I'll probably need to use an extra chunk of array to draw them separate from the rest of the board. Draw plain blanks, then plop letters on top. I might even make them Font-based, rather than Tile-based.

*sigh* This really has been an effort to get everything into place!

Alan continues..

You probably have read up on these things already, but just in case you weren't sure, a ''trie'' is not a ''tree'', it's its own thing

1. The "Swap Letters" dialogue. A secondary rack that pops up and lets you move letters into the Swap-Rack, before hitting the "Yep, swap!" button and having them be swapped, whilst you miss a turn.

Having a really odd issue, right now, where computer players are sneakily gaining blank tiles, when.. A ) The computer player can't make a move. and B ) There are no blank tiles in the bag. They're just sneakily plucking blank tiles out of mid-air! Baffling!

Alan asks..

What's the general outline of your current approach? The general method is as such. 1. The AI randomly picks a spot on the board, and scans to check that a word will fit in the space provided. It looks for a space that will fit about 3 or 4 letters and will connect to at least one other tile on the board.

The AI is selecting some nice placements, as well as some fairly decent words, but there are still "quirks" in the methodology.

Massive enhancements, tonight, as the Crossword Game's brain gets a little shove in the right direction.

The AI is now at least managing to play without murdering my laptop! A quick rewrite of the WordList, and a little bit of learning a bit more of Javascript's abilities, and I've now got things streamlined a little more. The next will be to add a bit more intelligence to the AI. As you can see in the screenshot above, all four AI players seem to be fairly balanced, but aren't exactly scoring massively. That'll be the next task, now that things aren't insanely slow and, deadly to my ...

I might need to rejig the way the WordList is held, to make AL's job a little bit easier.