Making Coffee chapters 4 and 5 released

The making of Coffee Quest eBook has finally been updated after a few years hiatus. I have added chapters 4 and 5 which finishes the creation of Coffee Quest 1 and the Coffee Quest GL experiment. I am deeply considering doing another 3D experiment using a new web technology that Google is testing. This would be done by porting Coffee Quest 2 to the javascript-based technology.

I was also hoping to have a pull down menu based poll for selecting which game my visitors most wanted to see enhanced. I never got around to writing the code earlier and as it is getting late I figured I would hold off on the official pull-down version of the poll (which I may make a permanent part of the home page) in the future. Still, email opinions are welcome.

Growing Words

I was planning on having a sneak preview of this release last week but I ended up taking the Easter long weekend off for a much needed recharge. I do hope to have a sneak preview of the next Dozen Days of Words game if it is in a playable state early enough. Growing Words is a semi-original game were you have a list of words that you have to build and a board containing some letters. Each turn you can move a letter. If you fail to form a word with your move, new letters sprout up. The number of new letters is dependent on the difficulty level.

I really like this game and wish that I had a lot more time to add a bunch of new features and play modes. For that reason, I am going to develop a deluxe version of this game. This development is kind of unique as it is the test project for a non-browser platform that I am experimenting with. While this means that many of the people who visit my site will not be able to play the deluxe version when it is done, it is always possible that I will port the deluxe version to other platforms if the experiment proves successful. More details on this when I am close to being done, assuming the project ever gets that far along.

Hanging things up

Episode 3 of Dozen Days of Words is finally released. While this game is a fairly traditional game and was easily finished in under 16 hours, finding those hours to work on the game was a lot bigger challenge than I anticipated. The next episode, Growing Words, will hopefully be put together a lot smoother than the previous episode.

Still sick but Dozen Days of Words episode 3 is done

Episode 3 is finally finished, though my cold still lingers. Normally I recover very quickly from colds but this one does not want to let up. Perhaps it is a sign that I am getting old. Perhaps the diet I am currently on is taking more out of me than I realized. Perhaps I happened to have caught a very strong strain of whatever it is that infected me. This means that I didn't get as much work done as I wanted to. That said, the planning and skeleton for episode 4 has been completed. The fourth episode is a semi-original game and as such means that the results are not predictable but the idea seems like it should be fun so hopefully the results will be a fun game.

Sick

It turns out that my decision to delay Episode 3 was the correct one. Last night other obligations showed up. To make matters worse, I had a sore throat which as I feared turned into a full-blown cold. By cold I really mean that I really am cold and just hope all my shivering actually is burning off calories. Not much work on Episode 3 is going to be done today but if the weekend finds me feeling better then you can be sure that a large block of time will be devoted to both Episode 3 and Episode 4.

Delay confirmed.

While a lot of progress was made on Dozen Days of Words episode 3 today, and if I work on it in the evenings before the initial release date it is likely that it could be finished on time, I have decided that I will officially delay the game a week. While I do intend to try and still get the game done before Friday, it will not be released until April 3rd no matter when it is finished. The fourth episode will start development immediately after the third episode is finished. It is tentatively scheduled for release on April 17th and will hopefully not be delayed.

Falling behind schedule

A funeral occupied a good chunk of my day and progress on the third episode of Dozen Days of Words is not as far along as I would like. I plan on hopefully finishing the game tomorrow, assuming nothing comes up. I do hope that I will not have to delay next week's game but if worst comes to worst then I may do so.