Timer and Pausing

While I didn't get anything super exciting done on the game yesterday, I did get some good features added in.

First of all, I added a count down timer so the player has a time limit as they play. I started with 2 minutes, but I found that was actually plenty of time to use 20 clicks, so I lowered the time to 1 minute 30 seconds, and that seems to be right on the mark. I've play tested more than a few times, and I've actually run out of time in a couple games with 3 clicks left to use. So, as a result of adding a time limit, the hourglass animations now changed based on remaining time, and the game ends when either the time runs out or the player is out of clicks (which ever comes first).

Now that there is an actual time limit, I didn't want players to be able to see the board prior to starting a game, so now the game starts when you click the start button above the hourglass, or the hourglass itself. Then the entire board is filled with the tile respawn animation and the game is on. My new high score with the set up is 12310, which is only 62 points lower than my previous high score, but I had a really lucky game with several high scoring chains.

The second cool feature I added was the ability to pause the game. When the player presses the menu button on the device, the game timer stops ticking down, the tile board goes invisible, and a "PAUSE" image shows up in the middle of the screen. So far it has come in handy several times when I've had to sneeze in the middle of a game. I made the game board go invisible so that players couldn't just pause the game to plan for a second and then start the game up again. I think that is a pretty straight forward choice and it works out pretty well.

The next thing I want to add to the game is a menu on the pause screen with a button to restart the game. Instead of making the player go back to the main menu page to start a new game, they should simply be able to pause and select the restart option. This will work while in the middle of a game or when the game is over.

After the restart option, pretty much the rest of the game is getting menu and setting pages done, and then a couple extra game modes.