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!

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.

AL's getting slightly better, but is currently only attempting about 2 word placements per frame.

I've just had a fairly decent game against AL. His AI's not quite up to much, but he is at least managing to play along.

Attempt number one hasn't gone particularly well. The game struggles to keep up with itself, and my laptop's fan kicks into overdrive, while the game just about manages to find the word "AA" in amongst all the possibilities!

You know when you spend hours working on something, then look back at what you've done, and go "What on earth did I actually do?" .. I did that, yesterday!

RSKGames

When I was playing Golf Solitaire in my android chrome browser found an odd issue where the drag and drop card gets placed in the top left of the screen as seen in the attached screenshot.

Crikey! This game's harder to code than I remembered.

Board Layouts.. Not easy! But the main ones are in, now. Regular Scrabble, Super Scrabble, Words With Friends, and there's also the option for random layouts, so that's nice!! More to come..

Golf Solitaire isn't nearly as bad as Beleaguered Castle Solitaire! You can Play Golf Solitaire here in the Card Games section of the Shoebox.

I spent a good number of hours, yesterday, looking online for any rulesets that might make "Beleaguered Castle Solitaire" any better, but failed miserably to find anything. I did find a number of alternative solitaires that claimed to make the game a little harder, though, so.. Um.. Yeah, ok!!

Oh dear, this game's hard! You can attempt to play Beleaguered Castle Solitaire in the Shoebox in amongst the card games.

Yeah, that did the trick.. The Shoebox now clutters your browser history! I'm currently trying to figure out the best way to remove the hundreds of references that are built up as you navigate through the games, but .. For now, at least, the Back Button on Android should now behave as you'd expect it to. Hurray!

I can't fathom this stuff out!

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*

So, the Shoebox now has Level capabilities.. That's nice! I'm tempted to add something like Quadoban, or maybe a Kee-Bo-Ard, but that would definitely be crossing the border between physical and arcade.. I might need to come up with some way to mesh the styles together, somehow, and create a brand new sort of game. Hmm..