Block 1

January 4th, 2009

12:30 While technically the second game in Dozen Days of Words isn't exactly a word game, it does make use of the alphabet. The real reason that I am developing this game is simply that I have the idea for the game in my head and it sort of fits in with the rest of the series which needs a few more games anyway so I am cheating a bit. The game is fairly simple. There are two players (one of which may be computer controlled). There are also 26 boxes which contain points. One player, the chooser, eliminates boxes over a series of rounds until there is only 1 box left. At the end of each round, the bidder makes an offer to the chooser based on what he or she thinks will be the point value in the final box. The chooser can lock in the offer or refuse the offer. Once all but one of the boxes have been removed, the winner is determined by the point value in the final box based on if a value was locked in or not. If a value has been locked in, then if the value is greater than the locked in amount the bidder wins otherwise the chooser wins. If the chooser refused all offers than the chooser wins if the last offer that the bidder made was smaller than the offer and loses if the offer was bigger than the offer.

The game will have seven rounds as follows:
round 1 – chooser eliminates 4 boxes leaving 22
round 2 – chooser eliminates 4 boxes leaving 18
round 3 – chooser eliminates 4 boxes leaving 14
round 4 – chooser eliminates 4 boxes leaving 10
round 5 – chooser eliminates 4 boxes leaving 6
round 6 – chooser eliminates 3 boxes leaving 3
round 7 – chooser eliminates 2 boxes leaving 1

The points that may be hidden behind the boxes are as follows:
1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, 100, 200, 250, 500, 750, 1000, 2000, 2500, 5000, 7500, 10000, 20000, 30000, 50000, 100000, 200000, 250000, 500000

13:30 With the preliminary plans for the game done, my goals for today can be worked out. My must reach before I can think about quitting goal is the layout of the game. If this is finished before 16:00, then some of the other game-play mechanisms will be worked out. I best get started.

15:30 A quick and dirty reworking of the title screen and game code from episode 1 to get the very basic build of the game. Reworking old code is arguably not the best way of doing things but since a lot of the game mechanics are similar doing this does save me a fair bit of work and I was able to get a lot done very quickly. The new title has three different ways of starting the game. Right now, since none of the computer controlled player code is in place, all three buttons start the head to head game. As the computer controls get implemented, the actual game modes will be placed here.

The game layout still needs a bit of work, as it laying out four rows of 7 where as the game needs 26 tiles not 28. I am thinking that the best way of doing this is to shift the second and fourth rows and only have those rows contain 6 letters. So the basic layout isn't quite finished yet but will be.

16:05 The shifted layout has been finished and I have added letters to the tiles. I am still going to have to adjust the color eventually but for now the color scheme is the same as for Scrambled Pyramid. That should be good enough for today. Even though I haven't finished as much as I wanted, I have achieved my goal for the day and it is snowing here again so I had better shovel the driveway before it gets too bad.