Dozen Days of Words
Episode 11: Circle Word
 Read-me File

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Dozen Days of Words episode 11:Circle Word
copyright (c) 2010 Blazing Games Inc.
based on code from
Ultimate Retro Project Episode 46: Modern Circle Word
Copyright (C) 2006 Blazing Games Inc.
 
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA


REVISION HISTORY

June 1, 2010 - Official release
June 11,2010 - 1.1 release added better game setup and a better generator

ABOUT DOZEN DAYS PENTALOGY

The history of the Dozen Days Pentalogy is kind of mixed up. Initially, for
a brief stint when I was going to make Blazing Games have daily updates 
(back in the time when I had hopes of turning Blazing Games into something 
more than a hobby) I decided that I would have a series of games that were
created in a single day. Just after announcing the project, I got a real
third-party project and had to cancel my daily update plans as well as put
on hold the Dozen Days project. 

I then had an idea for a single game that would combine the 60 games
(5 series of 12 games) that made up the planned series. The first epi
was created and then I ended up again putting the series on hold. 

The next time I came back to the series, I decided to go back to the
original game in a day roots and create each episode of the series as a
game-in-a-day challenge. This was successfully done for the first series in
the game, Dozen Days of Dice. In Dice, the only code/assets that I allowed
myself to use was code/assets that I created for earlier episodes in the
series. Code-reuse actually did play a huge part in the development of the
later episodes when I switched from Flash development to Flex development
due to Flex being more Open Source Friendly. There was one problem. Finding
a whole day to develop the game in was proving to be quite a challenge. So
in November of 2008 I had a poll on my site asking if people cared if the
games in the series were developed in a single day or if I could switch
to a multiple-session development format but would still restrict the
development time to under 24 hours. 

For the Second series, Dozen Days of Words, I switched to that  multi-session
format. At the time I am writing that, the series is just underway so I will
update this section when I start season 3 of this game in 2010.

UPDATE: I have decided to switch to HTML 5/JavaScript for the last two episodes
of the second season/series of games.


POSTING GAME ON WEBSITES

This is a HTML 5 game written in JavaScript. The bulk of the code is in the
CircleWord.as file which is called from a html file that sets up the canvas and
calls the game setup routines. It should be noted that IE does not support the
canvas tag so if you want to use this game with IE then you will need to look
into the exCanvas project.

PROGRAMMING NOTES

This is part of the Dozen Days of Words series and as such was created in under
24 hours. There is a development journal outlining how this game was created
on the Blazing Games site.

