curtis.lassam.net

* A background with play instructions
* Fixed gameboard cutting off at the bottom
* Modal dialogs
* Animation & buttons
* Other things!

So, the original build of The Watchmaker’s Dilemma had obfuscated tokens. It was confusing, and a bit too mishy-mashy for my tastes.

Then, over the weekend, I replaced them with non-obfuscated tokens, and it made the game almost a little too easy.

Just now, I added the ability to swap between obfuscated and non-obfuscated tokens. The user gets a chance to learn the tokens (in “Easy” mode) and then a chance to identify them sight un-seen (in “Hard” mode). It seems about just right.

33 commits this weekend, of varying sizes, against Watchmaker’s Dilemma. There’s still an awful lot of work to do, but it’s at least presentable. And playable. Lots of style work this weekend, too – token tiles and a ticking title screen have been the main brunt of that.

Still, though, only 11 different tokens doesn’t make for much of a game. A good demo, maybe, but there needs to be a lot more tokens to make the game an explorable experience.

Upcoming Stuff

• Kill the “alerts”. Kill them so hard. They are the Worst Thing.
• Add some useful information to the error messages. (“Try turning it off and on again.” )
• Give the user the option to scramble the token identifiers for added difficulty. (“Hard Mode”).
• More tokens! I have a notepad full of ideas for new ones. Marquis! Butterfly! Queen! Wallflower!
• Memoization for the token solution algorithm. The server has to work hard enough as it is.
• Add a ‘save’ button. (It’ll just give the user the URL to the page, but whatevs.)
• Test (and fix) against two open windows playing the same game.
• Style the backgrounds, the hint button, the new game button, the (recently added) save button, and the points.
• “+1″ and “-1″ animations under the mouse when the user gains or loses points.
• Give the user a maximum number of points. Currently it’s all too easy to get up to 30-odd points and then not worry about the game anymore.
• Add a timer so that users can play against a clock.
• Try some browsers that … aren’t Chrome.

thewatchmakersdilemma.com

So, I’ve been working on a puzzle game in my spare time as an excuse to dick around with Python, Javascript, and MongoDB.

I’ve finally reached the point where I have a working prototype. I haven’t applied any style, except for the absolute bare-bones minimum to make a usable product. Heck, I don’t even have the domain set up properly, yet. Darn slow registrar.

It’s still in an unstable ‘development’ mode ( Thanks to the magic of hooks, when I ‘git push’ from anywhere, it reboots all the things. Try to get away with that on a production machine. ) – okay, okay, I’ve prefaced this enough.

Version 0.5

So, I thought I’d give Corel Painter a try, and I’m finding it really frustrating. Can’t get the line-widths right, can barely get a straight line, having trouble with sizing, etcetera etcetera. I might just have to open a scratch file and draw a thousand bad, wobbly, bumpy circles to get them all out of the way.

Ah, well, learning experiences.

Good afternoon, the internet. I, Curtis Lassam, tireless champion of new-years resolutions, am attempting to cook for myself.

One resolution I made was to cook 50 things for myself. No pre-fab meals, either. I have a tendency to just go to town on a box of Macaroni and Cheese or some frozen dumplings for dinner. Nope. Doesn’t count unless I do something a little more ambitious.

The project begins tonight. The only problem is that my kitchen is, at the moment, not well stocked for any particular meal. Thus?

Confusion Gumbo

Confusion Gumbo is the name that I have given to this thing that I am making. It is constructed out of odds and ends that I found in my fridge, freezer, and spice rack.

Now, a traditional gumbo is a seafood-laced stew/soup, thickened by a dark brown roux or file powder. Confusion Gumbo is a gumbo in name only. It bears no relationship to anything that could be called a gumbo, and, in fact, is not a gumbo at all.

I started by putting 2 cups of quinoa into my rice cooker. I hit the ‘white rice’ button and started on other things. My rice cooker has only ever done 2 cups of anything (2 cups being the smallest available measurement), and it has only ever been used on ‘white rice’ mode. I imagine that, if I were to try to cook 6 cups of white rice in there, it would explode out of sheer bafflement. Rice would be everywhere.

Then, I diced half of a big purple onion that I had sitting in my fridge. (I’m not sure if ‘big purple onion’ is the correct terminology, here, but it’s evocative enough. ) I started it sweating in some vegetable oil, waited a bit, and then tossed in some cubes of spinach from the very, very back of my fridge.

After the cubes of spinach had started to morph from cubes into spinach-shaped things, I tossed in the last of my frozen shrimp.

Then what? Even my spice rack is pretty bare. I’ve got … uh… italian spices. Okay, tomato-based is a direction we can go, I guess. RANDOM THINGS ADD TIME! Tomato paste! Chicken stock! Rooster-brand chili-garlic paste! Worcestershire! Sun-dried tomatoes! Garlic powder! Kosher salt! Basil paste!

Aaand, mix with the finished quinoa!

It’s… it’s actually pretty tasty. If a bit confusing. And not at all a gumbo.

CONFUSION GUMBO!

Okay, that’s one point for home-cooked meals. Only 49 to go!