Blazing Games - Dozen Days - Words - Word Shift

Dozen Days of Words: Word Shift

Making of Word Shift

Time is development time not real-world time.

Tuesday May 5, 2009
0:00 - 1:00 Skeleton
The fifth episode of Dozen Days of Words is a semi-original game that is
essentially a combination of my Rotation Puzzle game and the Growing Words
game that made up episode 4. Words are formed by rotating rows or columns of
words but instead of having multiple levels, the words will continually be
added to the game board. The thing that prevents the game from going on forever
is a time limit that is increased every time a word is removed.
1:00 - 2:30 User Interface Layout
A smaller board and the buttons that control the game. These are located on the
edges of the board. Right now they trigger events but the event functions don't
do anything.

Thursday May 7, 2009
2:30 - 4:00 ShiftList reworked for game
The list of words for this game works a bit different than in the Growing Words
game. When the game starts, 25 words are chosen and the letters that make up
those words are added to the letter list. The words are not grouped into levels
of the same length but are created from a much larger list which contains words
of various lengths. When a word is removed, a new word is selected as the game
is time based not level based. For this reason, instead of generating letters
from the list of words, letters are generated every time a new word is added to
the list.
4:00 - 6:00 Rotation
Each direction (up, down, left and right) is handled by a separate function
though each of the functions is fairly similar in construct. The letter being
wrapped is removed. The rest of the row or column are copied into the shifted
location in whichever direction doesn't cause the letters to be overwritten.
The wrapped letter that was removed earlier is then placed in it's new side of
the board.

Friday May 8, 2009
6:00 - 7:00 Timer
The game countdown timer was implemented. For flexibility, the default game
time and the points/times awarded for completing words is variable set by the
start game function. Of course, the actual implementation of the game and
scoring is not quite finished.
7:00 - 9:00 Game Working
the actual implementation of the game and scoring. It is always a good idea to
actually call the function that handles word checking/removal when the player
makes a move but I am excited about plans I have for tomorrow so my brain is
not as focused on coding as it should be.

Monday May 11, 2009
9:00 - 12:00 Fine Tuning
First I added proper support for the three difficulty levels. Easy gives you
300 seconds, 5 points per letter and 8 seconds per letter. Medium gives you 240
seconds, 10 points per letter and 5 seconds per letter. Hard gives you 180
seconds, 20 points per letter and 3 seconds per letter. Due to a stupid mistake
this took way longer to implement than it should have. Next I added a proper
game over. Finally, I added high score support.