Blazing Games - Dozen Days - Words - Word Slide

Dozen Days of Words: Word Slide

Making of Word Slide

Time is development time not real-world time.

Saturday May 16, 2009
0:00 - 1:00 Skeleton
The sixth episode of Dozen Days of Words is a semi-original game that is
essentially a combination of my Sliding Puzzle game and the Growing Words
game that made up episode 4. Words are formed by sliding letters into a single
empty tile. 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 - 4:00 Slider and keyboard
The slider and movement of the slider was implemented via keyboard input. At
this point I have a complete game. This leaves me with about 8 hours worth of
fine tuning so the rest of this game development will be done in a very
leisurely way as I am essentially finished so I am in no rush to finish things.

Sunday May 17, 2009
4:00 - 5:00 Point and click slider
The controls along the sides of the game board have been removed. Point and
click support for moving the tile by clicking on where you want it moved to
have been supported. Right now it only moves the cursor one tile per click but
I might support whole columns of letters being automatically moved but first I
am going to add a bunch of animation icing.
5:00 - 8:00 Animated Tile
I am actually glad that I have so much time as my delta based animation for
moving the tile turned out to take significantly longer to implement than it
should have. The reason was that a time delta is based on the time that has
passed since the last frame and if you forget to save the new time for the last
frame then the time delta will be the entire time that the game has been
played. This results in the animation system defaulting to the final frame
of the animation so the animation is a single frame like it would be without
any animation. This means that the programmer who made this stupid mistake
ends up wondering why there is no animation happening and after banging his
head for a while ends up single stepping through the animation code a number
of times before finally realizing the stupid mistake. This is where programming
experience comes into play. I only lost about 90 minutes of time, while if I
made this mistake when I had first started programming (and it is an easy
enough mistake to make as it is simply the omission of a single line of code)
then it would have taken me significantly longer to figure out.

Monday May 18, 2009
8:00 - 8:30 Sliding sound
I was going to create the other sounds at this time as well, but something came
up so this session of work was cut short.
8:30 - 9:30 Sound
The other two sounds were finished and all the sounds were implemented into
the game.
9:30 - 11:30 Fine Tuning
Sound toggle button added so sound can be toggled on and off. Animated letter
replacement when a word is removed. Big version of timer and score.
11:30 - 12:30 New Title and a bug fix
After finishing my fine tuning I worked out the time and noticed that I was
still half-an-hour short of my 12 hour target. I figured that a quick
reworking of the title screen to use tiles would take under half-an-hour and
would add a bit of glitz to the game so I made it so. Then I played the game
for a bit and noticed a bug that I then quickly fixed but ended up going over
the half-hour mark by seven or eight minutes so the total development time for
this episode is twelve-and-a-half hours!