After the backup and restore, the iPad battery seems to be back to "normal" operation. I had an hour or so of YouTube time, wrote this week's Socoder newsletter and attempted an ALChoon in KORG Gadget, and the battery was still at about 40% by around 5pm. A lot of faffing around for functionality, but at least I don???t have to buy a new sodding iPad, now!

For the past few weeks, my iPad battery's been conking out halfway through the day, with about 30% remaining.

It doesn't help that my keyboard occasionally does double-taps, so about 5 or 6 deleted versions had me typing things like moodel, or cllick.. You can actually see a couple of double spaces in this version, but I figured they're passable! Bah, humbug.

I intended to get a lot of other stuff done, yesterday, but my mind wandered off into the realm of "Fun multiplayer thing I can add to SoCoder".

Action-Based Snake game seems to be the plan for this week. It's mostly based on the abandoned Action part of the Biscuit game, but feels much better as a standalone game.

Spent nearly all of today working on 3D Printing stuff. Most of the day was focused on the little Pixelart tool I started last month. I wrote a little STL format exporter, and although it's all kinds of messy, the Slicer tool seemed to be quite happy with the garbled mess I was giving to it. As a result, this lovely little fella got printed out. Following on from that, I did a little bit of neatening to my Pixelart-To-3DModel app, and I've posted the results here, at SoCoder, where it&#...

Each week, an influx of thoughts and comments on that week's game bombard my inbox. Let's see what @RSKGames thinks about the biscuit game! You can Download "Roland Eats a Stale Biscuit" here

@RSKGames

Liked the player pushing the blocks animation. Liked the animation on level completion. Background score is melodious to hear. And thus ends the good points

This week's game will probably be based on the Action-Snake thing I attempted to add on to the Biscuit game.

Guide Roland around the maze, using the many blocks to push his biscuits into an area he can eat them from.

I'm still not happy with the background for the Biscuit game. It's currently "Generic Starfield #1287894372", but I feel like I could possibly come up with something a bit more interesting. I'll be giving that a go, later.

Todo-list 1. Need some kind of background, although I'm not sure what that might be. 2. Need to add the online scores, which at this point will just be "Number of levels complete" 3. Need to add the tutorial to the first level. Otherwise, the game's nice and playable, and BOY can it be fiendishly difficult! (Either that or I'm just rubbish at it..)

Couldn't get to sleep, last night. The Level Layout grid was keeping me awake, as I considered how many alternative ways I could figure out the many possible sets of numbers.

After a bit of a chatter on this SoCoder thread, with help from Spinal and RSKGames, I eventually ended up with a spiral-based level selection. The main menu is now a big bunch of uninteresting looking squares. The middlemost square is initially unlocked, and as you complete levels, adjacent levels will unlock.

Yeah, the "After eating, go crazy!" stuff isn't working out. The two sections, puzzle vs arcade, are TOO different, and don't really work well together. Having it happen every single level just became repetitive, far too quickly.

SamuelAFalvoII on Twitter suggested something, yesterday. The biscuit game might be being tweaked as a result.

Added most of the animations, today, so everything's looking vaguely decent. Tonight/tomorrow will be designing a menu layout. I'm currently thinking of doing a grid, and unlocking surrounding levels. It'll be an easy enough way to do it, and I should probably try to come up with a reusable version of that sort of menu, to go into the Framework. Aaah, the joys of doing menus!!

As I continue to tweak the level generator, I've somehow managed to get it to make a few rare 3-biscuit levels. They're incredibly few and far between, but every 100 or so generated levels brings a 3-biscuit level to the forefront.

(YouTube) Apologies if anyone else is having issues with their virus checker, or other battles to get the game running.

Although I've now upgraded the level generator to handle more than 1 biscuit at a time, the maximum it seems to be able to make levels with is 2. After that, biscuits keep falling off the level, and the levels aren't completable. So, one or two biscuits at a time, but the levels are still kinda samey. Although the generator's coming up with nice and complex paths to get the biscuits, the end result is that you can complete the level much easier if you just ignore the complex path and do you...

What to add to the Biscuit game? Unsure of what else I can throw into the mix, I'm now instead considering just having a second and possibly third biscuit in the levels.

Tonight I worked on the level generator for the Biscuit Puzzler, and it seems to work reasonably well. The main problem now, is that with one biscuit in a grid of 5x5, the gameplay's more than a little repetitive. I'm going to have to see if I can come up with something a little more interesting to keep the game alive. As it stands, though, there's some fiendishly difficult puzzles coming out of the generator, and that's good to see Incide...

Last night I rejigged a lot of the Scrabble Scoreboard, and especially focused on the GUI a little. That Undo button still doesn't quite work, with it being tucked right at the top of the screen, but otherwise the new GUI looks a little more usable.

Had a nice long game of Super Scrabble against Mum, today, and the games last much longer, as expected! Took about 2 hours, or thereabout, before one of us had won*.

It's Mother's Day, here in the UK, so today will be spent mostly not doing my normal thing of disappearing with code all day! Today will, instead, be spent playing Scrabble.. Which I've conveniently gone and made a nice new App for playing with! Incidentally, I also bought Mum the Super edition of Scrabble, which has twice as many letter tiles, and oodles more space to play within. Yup, today's all planned out! See you tomorrow. And, Happy Mother's Day.

Might as well make this an official AGameAWeek release, eh? This week's release isn't really a game. It's more of a Tool, or a Game-Companion!

Today I have to look into re-integrating the WordList functionality into Monkey for the purposes of the Scrabble Scoreboard I made yesterday.