First off, I made a minor change to one of my games. The odds in Countdown Dice were slightly skewed towards the center of the board. On random rolls of dice, you are six times as likely to roll a 7 as a 12, yet there are only 3.5 times as many 7's as 12's. And these odds flattened themselves out as you worked towards the edges of the board. Hence the rockets in the center were easier to launch than the rockets at the extremes.

So I rebalanced things so that the 7 requires six rolls to launch, the 12 only one, and the rest fit that curve. I presume this will make the game easier and shorter than before, but that's the price you pay for fairness.

Anyway, I like the games to be short. Part of the appeal of my games is that they don't monopolize your life.



Next, I have my games mostly integrated with Kongregate, which is a social portal thingy that's centered around Flash games.

And you might actually like the Kongregate daily puzzles a bit better if you're not a fan of the ads. You'll still get ads, but they're shoved off to the side. The "games you haven't played" panel is now set to launch the game inside Kongregate rather than taking you to thecodezone's site.

Of course, you don't get the nice little browser with the previous day's rankings along with little previews of the winning games, but if you're subscribed to the RSS feed or the emailed results, you probably won't miss that anyway.

And, as a bonus, you get a little chat-window where you get to watch some of the most inane game-related chat ever :)

The biggest problem I see is that the Kongregate folks really aren't getting the "Zen" of my games. Most of the regulars to my games know the drill -- you play one game, you beat it, then you move on to your next favorite game. The Kongregate folks are kinda pissed that I don't have a "start over" button so they can play the game again.

. . .of course if I did give them such a button they'd soon realize that they're getting the same puzzle over and over, so I'm just going to hope for the best over there. If they hate it, they're invited to get their money back :)

Anyway, feel free to sign up and give 'em a try (I get 15 worthless brownie-points if you do). And if you don't like 'em over there, you're free to play 'em as you always have.

Oh, and for the record, everything still talks to the same database on thecodezone.com. If you play ConFusebox on thecodezone, or you play ConFusebox on Kongregate, or if you play ConFusebox on another game portal (more coming soon), your scores will be recorded in the same spot.

Enjoy!



Edit: If you want to go directly to my games, go here.