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I created the game Farkle for Gemini. Instead of playing against one another, you get 10 rounds to score as high as you can and rank on a leaderboard for the day.
I still need to fix my cron job to reset the game every day, but it should be rather functional. bug identification or suggestions welcomed.
Apr 10 · 6 weeks ago · 👍 skyjake, sev, drh3xx, norayr
A neat game!
For new players, it might help to have the scoring table at the bottom of the page when playing?
I thought I saw some errors in the examples in the table (the "3 pairs" and "2 Triples"? Also "5-of-kind" and "6-of-kind" have one four numbers?).
May I suggest a UX tweak for mobile? At least on iOS, when typing a space, the numeric keyboard switches back to the alphabet, which means when holding multiple dice, one will be doing a lot of toggling of the keyboard mode. A fix could be to not require spaces in between. Since you're only using the numbers 1-6, interpreting "236" as a number per character shouldn't be problem?
Also, a small bug: Gemini status code 60 should have a human-readable text describing the need for a client certificate, not a MIME type as you're currently sending.
Fun! I got pretty lucky.
@skyjake all great suggestions!
regarding the score example table, I had a corrected version but it was in a folder not in my repo. Good catch.
I was just thinking about mobile and how to improve the input - not having spaces might just do it. I'll try and fix this over the weekend.
I'll check out the code 60 as well.
much appreciated.
@skyjake
Point board added and I updated the input to accept with or without spaces on input (it just strips them out). Was a bit simpler than I thought.
Side note,
Still have to chase down that cron bug that's not resetting the game everyday. works manually, just not in cron.
@gritty Feels much nicer on mobile now, thanks!
Can't say I've done especially well so far but it's been fun. Thanks for putting this "out there".
@drh3xx glad you like it. I have couple fixes left, but I'm hoping to have it feature complete soon and just let it run.
Fixed a few bugs
- "straight" and "quad + double" now score correctly
- refreshing the page on the next day should now reroute to authorization page instead of throwing error
- hopefully dates with timezone offset corrected for gamelog. I'll see tomorrow.
- game shows "Filled!" upon fill instead of blank screen
- strips out repeated input selection numbers (111 is just 1)
A thought: since the game has a strong element of randomness, which can influence one's position on the daily leaderboard quite a bit, would it make sense to aggregate a longer-scale (monthly?) leaderboard as well with tournament-like scoring? That is, the top ~N daily players get a certain number of points that are accumulated to the monthly scores. This could highlight/reward the players that have the best strategy overall, possibly eliminating much of the randomness.
Neat idea. I'll have to think on this a bit and try something.
Added an all-time high score to the leaderboard. today's top scorer will kick it off. Tomorrow we'll see if I didn't mess something up.
sorry @skyjake, you had a good score yesterday too.
@gritty I noticed you made some interface improvements a few days ago. Nice! 👍
I have a question: how is your random numbers being generated? Some typical PRNG or do you have a higher-quality source for randomness? Not sure how much difference it makes in the end. Something to look into one day, perhaps.
@skyjake thanks!
for the numbers, IIRC it's something fairly basic in Python. I noticed the dice don't seem to have the real life "feel" as well. I'm working on the tournament board you suggested, so once I finish that and squash the bug that just got id'd I'll check into the number generator.
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