Next, the "games you played today" panel when you finish a game will soon be ordered by how often you play a game rather than by alphabetical order. This was a fortunate side-effect of me keeping counts of how often you play a game. It was originally done so I could give away the "most played" awards, but it also allowed me to make things a bit more convenient. This seems to be working, so probably tomorrow you'll see your most-played games at the top of the list. Cool eh?
Finally, I'm fixing a bug that an honest player gave me. Since I only check for your number of daily plays at login-time, there's nothing to prevent you from loading the same game in a dozen browser windows, logging in all of 'em, and playing 'em all, thus getting around the "three plays a day" limitation. I'll add an extra check to the back-end to fix this.
Although there's really little preventing me from raising or eliminating the daily limit. Honestly, if a person wants to play Pop Pies a dozen times, who am I to say he can't. The only real reason I do that is so that the top twenty items on the high-score table aren't just one person who likes playing the game over and over. And I'm using Pop Pies as an example because it routinely gets about 20 times as many daily plays as you see on the table, so a lot of people just like playing it as a guest.
The high score tables are still a fairly reasonable judge of your skills (provided you ignore the kids who post perfect scores in BaffleBees in 30 seconds), and I'd like to keep it that way for a little longer. And really, after your three daily plays there's nothing at all preventing you from playing a dozen more times as a guest or. . .gasp. . .playing another game.
Thoughts?
Next on the docket is another daily puzzle. I'm currently stuck between three choices. . .
1. Brain Bones. This is an old game of mine that's proven to be pretty popular through the years. It's well-paced and is really a natural for the format. Also I'd really like to have a standalone version of it again re-done to be a mite more modern. My only worry for it is that the strategy is reminiscent of Countdown Dice. You need to budget yourself quite differently than Countdown Dice, but the aim of making pairs and putting 'em in as many "slots" as possible is much the same (only with the addition of a discard die). I've been trying to keep the collection varied, so I'm just a little wobbly on what would otherwise be a shoe-in.
2. Cryptograms. Shelly demanded this one while at a get-together last Wednesday with some pals. One person talked of her love of Games Magazine and word puzzles. The only reason I've been thus-far avoiding word-puzzles are that the number of seeds aren't infinite. I'd need to keep a database of phrases on the site where you'd get the phrase-of-the-day to scramble. This isn't a real problem, as I already have a list of 600+ phrases from the existing game. It's just done a bit differently from the other games in the set.
3. A daily puzzle knockoff of Straight Dice. This seems to be a pretty trivial game, and its play-time would make it a natural for daily puzzles. I might change things slightly to better fit the format, but it's otherwise a lock.
Any thoughts?
Finally, am I the only person who's not all that interested in BioShock?
Just wondering.
I'm not interested in it either. I played the demo on the 360 and found it boring. I'm not exactly sure what all the fuss is about.