While getting a broader perspective on Super Hexagon, I read that the developer (Terry Cavanagh) also made VVVVVV (V6). V6 has been waiting to be played since the third Humble Bundle so I went ahead and fired it up. I wasn’t expecting to finish it, nor was I expecting to be sinking in a long play session just to finish it (sound familiar? it’s like deja vu with A Dark Room).

I’ve been working on a new project. (Famous last words?) The past two days, I’ve been diving back into JavaScript after my foray into C#. I have a definite outcome in mind for this project (a text-based game similar to A Dark Room), but story-wise and gameplay-wise, I’m at a loss. So, I’ve been keeping busy implementing utility functions that will add some “sparkle” to this project and I’ve learned a couple of lessons so far.

If Super Hexagon were an arcade game, my quarters would be vaporized in less than a minute. The simple controls and arcade-like feel make Super Hexagon fun to play in short bursts and for long periods. However, the psychedelic colors and flashing may encourage players to opt for short bursts over longer play sessions.

I picked up Masters of Mystery: Crime of Fashion for the iOS a while ago when it was free but forgot to install it on my iPhone until recently. It is a hidden object game with a handful of minigames to break the tedium of searching for objects. Best of all, it’s short and not too difficult to complete.

A friend sent me a link to A Dark Room and at first I thought it was a Twine-based game because it was entirely text and seemed to have the fairly simple interface that Twine supports while telling a story. However, that quickly changed as the game started getting a little more complicated beyond simple button clicking. It was the first game in a while that had me interested enough to stay up late to finish (I started at 4pm, ended at 11pm, with breaks in between).

One of the projects I have been working on is a C# app that generates JavaScript and/or SQL code from an Excel spreadsheet. The “need” for this app came about when I was working on a separate project, building on a tangent to Thai Typing. Thai Typing relies heavily on an array of glyph objects containing properties, particularly the Thai letter, the associated English letter on the keyboard, and it’s position on the canvas. I wasn’t expecting to make another Thai alphabet app, but I did and unfortunately I couldn’t easily reuse the glyph array. It started to make more sense to have a database (I chose to use an Excel spreadsheet for additional reasons) and a script to generate the code for me. Everything was fairly straightforward except when I was comparing the code I generated to my existing code, I noticed the Thai numerals were being converted into English numerals. Much to my dismay, there was no easy way to leave the Thai numerals be and I spent several hours going in circles before finding a simple solution that I can’t believe it’s not in the core .NET framework.

I’ve tried to play Stacking for the past two weeks. Even over the long holiday weekend, I just couldn’t bring myself to loading it up. I’m not sure if it’s my computer not being up to par with requirements (I’ve been too lazy to check) or if it’s just the game that doesn’t appeal to me. Either way, I was a little disappointed.

This chapter is aptly named “Design Patterns” and is the longest. It builds on the Gang of Four’s design patterns, implementing their concepts in JavaScript.

I just finished the Costume Quest DLC, Grubbins on Ice. It retains the charm of the original game, but adds three new costumes and a rather brief foray into the Repugia world.

This chapter talked about code reuse including inheritance and other methods like composing objects from other objects, mix-ins, and temporarily borrowing and reusing functionality without permanent inheritance. The book quotes the Gang of Four’s advice on preferring “object composition to class inheritance.”