Points and Hourglasses

I feel like I made some good progress yesterday. I added in some scoring functions that take in to account chain size and what I've come to call "Chain Generation". The main chain scoring function is a pretty simple recursive setup, but man, is recursion cool. Its always fun to play around with, provided it doesn't get complicated enough to induce headaches. There were a couple bugs at first with my score calculation equation (wasn't totaling up to as much as I wanted to) but they were easily remedied and the scoring is now just how I want it.

Oh, there was also a "bug" I fixed with respawning tiles where I wasn't checking a certain case that would lead to it spawning a tile in between 2 matching tiles (forming a chain of 3), which shouldn't happen. Anyway, that was a quick fix once I tracked down the problem.

I also added a super simple "Player" class that holds stuff like score and the number of clicks the player has left, in addition to respective text displays on the screen. Currently you start with 20 clicks (which I think is a good amount) and the game "ends" when you have no more clicks left. This makes the game actually playable now that there is both scoring and the game doesn't go on indefinitely. My current high score is 12372.

I've started working on an animated hourglass display for the time. The concept fits really well with the theme of the game, but right now I don't have an actual timer in the game. So for now the hourglass animations change based on the number of clicks the player has left and every 4 clicks the player does, the "sand" in the top half of the hourglass goes down, the bottom half fills a little, and it animates between 2 frames that make it look like sand is pouring down. I think once I've added the timer, I'll also add a text display of the time beneath the hourglass as well so the player knows exactly how much time they have left instead of having to gauge the hourglass. This makes it sound a bit like there is no point to the hourglass if the seconds are just shown on the same screen, but I feel like the hourglass will benefit the game aesthetically, fitting in with the theme well, in addition to giving the player a sense of urgency as they see the sand in the hourglass slowly sift down.

Getting the timer added and synced with the hourglass animation is really the last step I have to finish to get the game to full functionality. Then I plan to add a personal high score saving, hopefully with a leader board later on (Tim and I have been looking at Scoreloop), and then start working on some pages: main menu, settings, etc. I'm hoping to make a pause screen since AndEngine seems to have a good setup for that.

I also eventually want to add some different game types. I'm thinking a mode where there is no time limit so its a little more laid back people can think things out, and then also some sort of Time Attack mode where you have unlimited clicks and you have to see how fast you can get above 15,000 points or so. The latter mode would probably shave a few seconds off your time depending on how few clicks you used.

So, yeah, that's what I have going on.