Block 4

December 28th, 2008

18:00It is now time for my final block of work. The game is already finished at this point with the only thing left are proper puzzles and support for those puzzles. I would like at least half a dozen puzzles, with a dozen being my true target. In theory this is easy work. In reality, I am dreading this part as I find the coding much preferable. Still, lets start off by getting some puzzles worked out and then I can spend some time working on the puzzle selection and hint systems.

18:45 I have finished writing the XML segments for 3 puzzles which means that I am only getting a time of fifteen minutes per puzzle, which means that the half a dozen puzzle mark will likely be the outcome as I do want to write a puzzle selection system and that will probably take at least an hour. Still, three puzzles is enough to start with so I am going to start on the puzzle selection element and once that is done spend the rest of this block adding new puzzles.

20:20 The user selectable puzzle feature has been added. There is still the default random-puzzle option available. While testing this feature, I realized that the game didn't display hint text so I also added that to the game and slightly adjusted the layout positions of the tiles to accommodate for long hints. Now the only code-related task is to remove the debugging text. I suppose instead of having this text I could have just used trace and ran the game through the debugger (fdb) but I find it much faster to work this way only using the debugger when I come across a bug that I can't figure out in a few minutes.

21:45 I created another 4 puzzle sets and fixed a few minor bugs. Despite the slow start that this project had, I think it came together pretty nicely. It is true that the sessions were shorter than they should have been and there would have been more puzzles had I spent more time in earlier sessions. Considering that I am rushing this so the work is being done on my Christmas break, I am happy that I was able to put in the time that I did. Overall, I like this game but am sure that other people's opinions will differ. Comments (both positive and negative) are always welcome.

Play the game here