Time to connect the hexes! Grab a hex from the side, and smash it into alike-coloured hexes, to make them all disappear. 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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Lots of little things to do, today. This week's SoCoder Newsletter needs oodles of waffle in it, since the forum's been understandably quiet. It's too hot to stare at a forum, all day!! I also need to upload this week's ALChoon, and I haven't yet attempted to do a .XM of it. Hmm..

I've had to add a limit to how many hexes I'm drawing on the Petit-Switch screen at once!!

Over on the Switch, I'm reproducing a basic version of Clusters of Hex, and .. .. Oh boy, had I forgotten how much of a pain it was to code this thing in the first place!

Alan suggests

Looks pretty good. I did spot a slight half-pixel seam where the background wraps around. I like the parallax effect, though. I've cheat-fixed that for the meantime, by simply wrapping the buffer a single pixel closer to itself, but it might look more glitchy once I start doing different types of backgrounds. I need to add a "sprite to buffer" function, to check that, though. Other tweaks.. I've made the "Logo on a plain screen, waiting for the first click" screen a...

1. People seem utterly baffled by the start-screen of Browsercade. I put that there, because a lot of browsers need a single click before they initiate any audio, but seemingly people are instead "waiting" for it, and think the thing's broken. D'oh!!

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...

This week's game sees you trying to place the cards in such a manner that all rows and columns add up to 21. The game should be fairly easy to solve, as long as you remember the card values. Jack, Queen and King are all worth 10. Aces can be either 1 or 11. You can Play Pontoon Grid here, or wait for it to show up in your regularly scheduled puzzle sheet.

.. When you're awake late at night, and think to yourself "This will give me ample time, tomorrow, to do all the other things!"

Alan suggests

The fact that the die is white at the beginning of your turn, and also white after you roll makes it unclear at a glance whether the die's current value is your actual move. Not sure what the solution is. Maybe dimming the die or displaying question marks on its faces in pre-roll mode, and the normal white with pips in post-roll mode? A valid point. The "Popomatic" function has a "Locked/Unlocked" value, so I can use that to decide when to draw v1 or v2. I'll have a pl...

As I was drifting off to sleep, my mind was racing for a decent Foldapuz concept for the week. I thought about cards, and considered a grid of 5x5 cards.

In order to properly test my onscreen touch controls, I'm going to need some kind of quick playable game, so that's going to be today's task. Something short and simple, but complex enough to really put the controls to the test.

After I release more and more games, player's try desperately to keep up! Let's see what RSKGames thinks of today's Shoebox addition. You can Play Grid of Conquest in the Shoebox, under the Group Games section.

@RSKGames

''Grid of Conquest'' immediately reminded me of ''Might of the Balls'' which was incidentally made almost on a similar date last year ''23rd July, 2018''. Oh yeah! I'd actually forgotten about that game.

Try to fill up as much of the board in your colour as you can. Normally you can't move over opponent's tiles, but if you earn a 6, you're allowed to move wherever you'd like. There are additional green spots on the board. Reach these for a couple of extra points. You can Play Grid of Conquest in the Shoebox of Games under the Group Games section.