Hello All,

TinyBlocks is a puzzle game where the aim is to push all
the same colored blocks together to advance to the next level.

Arrowkeys = MOVE

Backspace = UNDO

UPDATE: http://mazeland.net/tinyblocks/index.html


I will attempt to make a multi-player co-op game where four
players need to get to the center in order to advance to the
next level.

In case there aren't four players to play with you will be
given the opportunity to go to the 'empty' room and finish
that sub-level so that you can also play the game by your own.

Score will be given for speed and number of steps (lowest is best )




I'm still thinking of gameplay where I might use obstacles that
you need to get rid off and/or give each player the same colors to
work with to have room for more blocks .. And/or use different
colored blocks that you need to combine ..

Ideas are:

- Canons / Lasers
- Holes to avoid / Water ..
- Wind / Ice = Sliding blocks
- Train that moves blocks for you
- Only push , no pull
- Unlimited undo

..

Best regards from

M.E.

The obvious way to do a disconnect would be for the client to send a disconnect message when stop() is called.
Other than that, I don't think there's much you could do except add a timeout on the server.
If there are clients whose last timestamp is older than for instance 5 seconds, they will be considered disconnected.
It should be easy enough to run a MySQL query where you ask if an int has a value below a certain value
(you can use timestamp or something, but you could simply use a number and calculate the timestamp in PHP).
You could have different flags for different states a client is in: linkdead (perhaps the link could be re-established), disconnected, idle.
Of course upon a real disconnect, you might want to delete the client row from the clients table.

Not sure what you mean by heartbeat control, do you mean avoiding speed hacks?
Well, the client could timestamp all communication with the server, if it is updating too fast the timestamp has most likely jumped too far ahead.

Keeping track of rooms and where in a room a player is can probably be handled using a simple numbering scheme.
By rooms here, do you mean rooms in a four-player map, or a lobby system to start a game?

Hello All,

So here is a major update.
Just a month of development to go, so I want
to get some feedback on the current status.

Goal: Multiplayer game were you all need to
get to the middle of the board.
You don't need other players to advance in the
game. All players get the same puzzle, but a
different 'mirror' on the puzzle.

You can create your own room when there are
none to select from. Selection of rooms is
based on the level you achieved.


At the moment there are four kind of blocks:

- playerblock
- stone-block = cannot be moved
- finish-block = the middle of the board
- 'color'blocks
The object of the game is to push the
colorblocks to eachother to get them removed
from the board. Not all blocks need to be
removed, just the once you need to get to the
finish.

Maybe later I will let the blocks do some other
things as well, but for the time being it is
just 'push to match-blocks'

Controls: keyboard-arrows

          Backspace = undo

You can make an account with 3 characters! (tiny-space!)

http://mazeland.net/tinyblocks/index.html

Journal entry:

Game has a scale of 12!

There are 5 main MySQL tables.
   users, data, rooms, scores, levels
Controlled by PHP script that gets called by
an URL connection from Java.

The users table has a heartbeat field.
The heartbeat is updated each time a user
gets / receives data from the server.
When a heartbeat gets lost, the player is
removed from the board (rooms-table)

The data table contains all the board-data
and the updates that are done on the board.
Initially the board-data gets copied from
the levels-table that contains the puzzle
to be mirror-copied to the differnt areas.

Scores will be stored, but there is
no list at the moment to get a 'low'score
overview.

When you reached the last level, the next
level will be the first level of the game.

Hello All,

The state of the game is that I will be unable to
have the features that I wanted in the game.
I had made a developers version with a
palette-editor so that a player can create
levels with their own colors.
I had the game play-tested by one of my friends
and he pointed out that the palette editor
would violate one of the rules: not showing
more than 16 colors from the palette at
the same time.
It is too late in the contest to drastically
change this behaviour so I don't have
any real thing left.
The previous version just lacks a lot.

Maybe I will be working on this game later this
year, but I will not enter the current state to
the contest.

I enjoyed it anyways and took the opportunity
to use this contest to prototype some of the
game-ideas I have.

I wish all the other entrants best of luck in the
contest!

Best regards from
M.E.