Anchors Plays on MS Surface as is!

My new Microsoft Surface arrived last night and I have been trying to learn how to use it. MetroTwit crashes every time I launch it, even though I have reinstalled it over half a dozen times.

After giving up on Twitter, I thought, what the heck I'll try my own web app.

The last thing that I expected was for it to work. But it did. The Surface uses Internet Explorer, so I thought I would have to write special code for it. And I didn't expect the touch screen to work so well with an app that I had written without the aid of a touch screen to tweak and test it on.

The game board loads a little small on the screen, but with the zoom gesture I was able to expand it to a very playable size. The normal game speed is pretty slow, but with a little difficulty I was able to use my mouse and increase the game speed with my home-brew slider control. The touch pad on the keyboard and the very small target on my screen made it tough. These are things I can correct. The slow speed of the Surface is a common complaint on the Twitterverse and I don't thing there is much I can do about that.

You can try the game out yourself. Click this link for the beta version. I don't expect it to work on the desktop version of IE, but it seems to work on most other web browsers. Please let me know if your browser will run it.

Gone are the Gumdrops!

Partly because I've been staring at the Gumdrops and Gummy Bears for so many weeks, and mostly because we felt that the images on the game make it look like it was for children. Those of you that have played it, know it requires thinking skills beyond those held by most of the younger set of players.

This morning as I was waking up the idea of switching to Anchors popped into my head. I thinking that the 'Drop' in 'Drop Your Anchor' matches the game much better than the 'Drop' in 'Gumdrop.'

Keeping with the theme, I decided to add Mooring Buoys to replace the Gumdrops and let the Anchors do the job that the Gummy Bears did before.

Everything about the game is still the same. Only the images have changed. And I like the way we can have a contrasting white stripe on the buoys. Having said that, the code for the original graphics is still in the program and I could make that an option that the user could select. Can you think of another theme that you would like to be able to choose?

I have started clamping down on the cheaters. Yes, did you know there were ways to cheat? If you wanted to preserve you bonus points when you were about to lose, you could refresh the page and start over. I was able to come up with a way to make that the same as a loss and knock the bonus points down to 10 again.

Some of you will be seeing a nagging window to register the game for a very nominal fee on PayPal. I need to test that, too. The fee is real small, only $1.98. I would encourage you to ignore it for a while and click the 'Not Now' button. Later, if you would like to test the payment procedure for me, go ahead and make the purchase. Then let me know you did and I will jump in and refund the money for you. PayPal allows me to do that.

Player Levels

Hey Beta Testers. Thank you for your help. To get this project up and running, We need a lot of volunteers. Share this blog with all your friends and encourage them to try our game.

Let's talk about Player Levels for a moment. There are four main levels in the game:

1. Training Mode
2. Moderate
3. Difficult
4. Challenging

Training Mode should give you a chance to discover what works well and what doesn't. There are four stages in this level. Each time you win a game you move to the next higher stage. You have only two rows of targets to remove and the number of columns increases as you move from stage to stage.

Moderate level adds a third row of targets and backs you off on the number of columns again. It also has four stages and progresses the same as Training Mode. Both of these first two levels give you a chance to perfect your 'End of Game Strategy'.

Difficult mode steps up the challenge to four rows of targets. This is where the game was originally. Winning is not as easy. If you lose five games in a row at this level, you will be demoted down to Moderate again. There are five stages to this level.

Challenging is. Does that make sense? When you work up to this level, it will. Now with five rows and nine columns, you start this level with a full field of 45 targets to remove. Hang in there and tough it out. If you can win two or three of these in a row you will have a huge high score. As with the previous level, if you lose five games in a row, you will be demoted down to Difficult again.

Do you see my high score in that window above? 191. We used to get demoted after three loses. I decided to give myself a break and changed it to 5. I'm at the 3rd level there and was demoted from the top more than once. I'm still looking for a score in the 200's. Can you do it?  Let us know, if you do.

Game Overview - Spoiler Alert

The best Beta Testers are not going to read this post. We would like your game to be intuitive and obvious to the player. If you skip this post and start trying to figure it out, your feed back will be very helpful.

If you need more to get your started, then read on. Your contribution is valuable too.

The current version of the game has two tiny buttons near the top that provide 'Info' and 'Help'. This is where a new player finds out how to play the game. I have already heard that a button labeled 'H' for help is not as intuitive as I thought. In fact, the '?' may seem like the more obvious one to try at first. So I probably got that all wrong right from the start. What do you think?

The object of the game is to remove all of the targets located at the bottom. You are given objects at the top that you can choose from to form a row that will start falling, one at a time, onto the group at the bottom. It may seem like a lot of chaos at the beginning, but every choice you make has a result that is 100% predictable. There are just a few simple rules that you will soon learn that will help you make the best choices with the random options you have at any time.

The idea of this game came from 'Tetris'.  That is a game that requires quick actions and fast thinking as objects are manipulated while they fall into a field below. This game lets you think and prepare. It requires careful planning and exercises your mind's ability to anticipate the future location of objects that are going to move in a predicted manner. So, if you know that you have to drop 3 pieces, you need to know which column will be under the third after the first two have changed to board.

There is also another skill used in the game. It is the understanding of how primary colors mix to form secondary colors. When a player lands on a target, the primary colors that they share in common are canceled out. What's left, if anything, will be the primary color(s) that they don't share. Do you remember messing with finger paint when you were in elementary school? You squirt some blue paint on one side of the page and some yellow paint on the other. Then you start swirling them around with your fingers mixing them together and like magic this cool green color appears.

Scoring is done by giving you points when the game begins and subtracting them each time you select a player to drop. You start with 3 points for every target and then a minimum of 10 bonus as well. If you had only 3 shots at each target, you wouldn't win very often. If you successfully clear the board before you have used up all of your points, those left over points become your bonus points for the next round. If you lose, your left over points are taken away and you start again with only 10.

As you learn how to win multiple games in a row, your high score starts to climb. Be sure to let me know if you get it up over 200. It can be done. In the training mode and the lower levels of the game, it is easier to win the game and build up a high score. Later when you are at the higher levels you may find it difficult to beat that high score, because it is harder to win 3 or 4 games in a row.

So dust off that finger paint corner of your brain and start clearing the board!

So what is a Beta Tester?

When we write software we spend hours and hours running the program looking for things that don't do what they are suppose to do. When we find something, we fix it and then we keep testing over and over.

Then just when you think you have found everything that could possible go wrong, you try it out on someone who knows nothing about your program and right away they start doing things you never thought to do. Usually they break it.

This is a good thing. You want your project to work no matter what people do to it. So having friends who are willing to put it through its paces is very helpful.

I am hoping I can get people like you who will enjoy the game and let me know when they see things that don't seem right.

For example, the current version of the game, v0.012 beta, has a little bug in it that actually helps you win the game. If you put a bear in the last position of your drop row and it slips off the bottom of the game without hitting any targets, the column next to it slides down a notch for free! You didn't even touch it and it clears the bottom target for you. It isn't suppose to do that. Those are the things my beta testers are going to tell me about.

How do you become a Beta Tester?

That's easy. Just click this link and start playing the game. There is a tiny yellow button with an 'H' in it. Click there for instructions and help.

Hey Guys!
Thanks for popping over to my Beta Testing Blog.

I've been working on this project for about six weeks and it is time to put some people on it and start testing it. The game you see on the left is written in JavaScript and uses HTML5. That means it uses the newest features available to web developers, especially something called 'canvas'.

Canvas allows us to manipulate an image on your screen and opens the door to games and animation! Whoopeee!

That's the good news. The bad news is that your browser might not support all the cool things that I've put into this game. You can give it a try, but I recommend that you make sure you are running the very latest version of your favorite browser. You know all those annoying messages you ignore about updating your browser. Well, it's time you do it.

Also, let me warn you that Internet Explorer, also know as IE, seems to run behind the times on new HTML5 features.  They also like to do the same things that everyone else does DIFFERENTLY. This means that programmers like me have to put special things in our code just to get them to work with IE. 8-(

My approach to this has been to ignore IE and work on the real problems of animation and knowing which object I just bumped into and stuff like that. I don't plan on solving the IE issues until everything else is working just the way I want it. So I hope you have a browser (any browser) other than Internet Explorer that you can try this on. I know it has been working on Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. It has been played on PC's, Mac's and Linux machines.

And then there are the touch screens. This is a whole new realm for me to work with. But what fun! Earlier versions of the game were running pretty good on Kindle Fire. I was able to run it on my iPhone, but I had big issues with that. The game board was only a fraction of the size of the screen. (It fit the Fire just perfect!). I had to allow the script to pass through gestures to let you zoom in on the board which then created a new problem that while playing the game my touches wanted to move the image around. The truth is, the objects we play with in this game may simply be too small to be practical on something as small as a smart phone. Oh, darn. I have so much to learn. We may be able to revisit this issue and make it work.

Mouse clicks are very precise and accurate. Finger touches are somewhat ambiguous and fuzzy. I understand now why the icons on my phone or so large and have all the space around them.

The current version is not working on my iPhone at all now. If you have a touch tablet computer, please give it a try and let me know if anything happens. I will be going back to that part of the project soon. It's higher on the list than even IE.