This really has turned into a lame blog, a mere log of running. Where did all my creativity go? Why, to the Dot Game of course!
Actually, that’s not trure either, since I didn’t create the Dot Game, I merely copied it, albeit to a different medium.
What the hell am I talking about? All the important people know, but I’ll tell you.
A few months back I downloaded this simple little game called SameGame to my cell phone, and everyone in the family likes to play it. The idea is that you score by removing groups of two or more connected dots with the same color and removing larger groups give more points. You play until you have no more moves to make (no two dots are still connected). There’s a little trick to scoring high, but I won’t reveal it since it shouldn’t take long to figure it out. The game is so simple my five year old loves to play it (and he’s the one who named it “the dot game”).
In fact, my family liked it so much, they wanted to play it online, or offline, or whatever the case may be when it’s on the computer and not on the phone. We thought surely it would be on the web somewhere. But no, apparently it’s only available as a cell phone game. And so looking at it I thought, “I bet I can rewrite the game in JavaScript.”
And so I did. Took a few nights and more than a few games played on my phone, but overall it was pretty simple. For any programmer types out there, it’s basically a bunch of for-loops. No algorithms to speak of, just dumbly walking through a few arrays. (As a side note, if you’re a web developer and haven’t been turned on to FireBug, you should get the 1.0 Beta version right now.)
So the Dotgame is exactly like the original SameGame, except for one thing (and my less-than-optimal graphics abilities). At the end of the phone version, you get bonus points for having fewer dots left, but I haven’t figured out the value pattern for that. A few test games shows the following:
Dots-Left/Bonus
19/6
16/7
10/12
8/15
4/31
If anyone sees the pattern, let me know. I’m sort of slower and stupider these days. [update]The bonus was rather simple.[/update]
Anyway, give it a try. It should work in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, though I’ve hardly tested it all in IE since we’re a Firefox family (I did notice that the board reload is sub-optimal in IE but I haven’t looked into that). I don’t know about Safari or other browsers, and there’s doubtless a lingering bug or two somewhere.
It’s fairly mindless fun that can kill 30 seconds of your day. Since it’s basic Javascript/HTML, you could even download it to your PC or laptop and run it from there. Maybe you’ll even beat my high score of 1500.
dude, great game! Whats the trick you talk about that gives you a high score?? I sent it to my co-workers and they dig it as well.
thanks.
trick? did i mention the trick? surely you’ve already figure it out. really, it’s not so much a “trick” as it is the most logical way to play the game given the scoring.