Block 3

December 27th, 2008

12:45 The goal for today is to get the game running. Once I have done that, I will keep adding features until I am close to the four hour mark. I don't know where the game will go as I make refinement passes, but it should be an interesting journey.

13:00 Getting the tiles to handle clicks should have been very easy. A simple event listener would take the target tile as the selected tile so no special handling would be needed. Unfortunately, the textfield object inside the tile gets the mouse click so the target field is incorrect. My solution to this is to create a new event specifically related to text tiles. The tile class then sends this message to the

13:30 With the two step event handling process done it was simple to get the tile handler to swap tiles. This means that the game is almost done. Now to add a win check. We will, for now, simply set a debug message if the game is solved.

13:50 Solving is done simply by building words out of the letters that make up the tiles then checking those words against the official solution. At this point we have a finished game! Now I am going to spend a few minutes just walking around thinking about what to do next and then start on the first of my additional refinement passes.

14:30 I decided to start off with my cosmetic pass. A bit of a cheat for the background color by renaming the debugging variable and using my debug text field as a backdrop. I also changed the tile colors and the border. A proper win message was also created. I still have at least an hour and fifteen minutes of work to do today so the next pass will be something major. I am going to add a hint mode.

15:15 The win game was totally re-written to test individual letters instead of words. This has the side effect of allowing the hint checking to be processed at the same time. Hints are simply border colors that are set to the “correct” color when correct and the tile color when not correct. The hint button is a button that changes it's text based on whether hints are enabled or not. So, hints were a lot easier to implement than I thought so the next feature that will be added will be a timer.

15:50 The timer itself is simple, and could have been implemented in half the time if I was in a rush. I simply enabled the “on enter frame” event and use the getTimer function to find the difference between the current time and the game's start time. Setting up a text field to hold the time information and a bit of user interface adjustment to make everything fit nicely and we are done. One other change, which is probably important, is that I am renaming the game to Scrambled Pyramid as that seems to better fit the visuals.

The game has come a long way. I know that no matter how poorly tomorrow goes that this challenge has been successfully competed. Tomorrow, I will be coming up with puzzles and perhaps will think of some other features to add.