I'm really rather curious to see if this annoys anyone, as it really doesn't change the usability of the game at all. Instead of dismissing a PAUSED box to start your game, you'll now dismiss an ad. I'm wondering if anyone will suddenly get upset that I'm filling their screen with ads even though I really haven't changed the usability at all.
We'll see.
Additionally. . .
I made the games menu page a mite more tasteful. Rather than burning your eyes with animations, the buttons only animate if you mouse over 'em, ala Popcap.
Pop Pies has been improved a bit. I added a "column bonus" for eliminating a complete column of pies. This fixes what I thought to be a problem with Pop Pies --there's no really good endgame strategy. Hopefully having a secondary way of making points will remedy this. It's not uploaded yet, so don't start looking for it yet.
Two last things I wanna do is to better "link" the standalone games and the daily puzzles so that you can use the daily puzzles for practice. What that's gonna entail is that there'll be some text on each game's page saying something like. . .
"To practice this level in standalone ChessCards, choose game number 21124"
And that game will be the same between the web-version and the standalone one. That'll serve three purposes.
1. It'll actually give the standalone game owners a way to practice.
2. It'll give me one more place to add a link to the "buy the games" page.
3. A sly and wily user will realize that the numbers are progressing by ones, so by choosing game 21124+1, he'll get to play tomorrow's game before everyone else, thus giving him an unfair advantage (that he richly deserves because he gave me money).
Finally I need to re-do my coupon-code stuff on the buy-page. My current scheme for calculating prices and magical coupon codes is too cumbersome. I thought of a better way.
Shelly wants thecodezone to have its own paypal account, so I'm working on that. That means that The Code Zone for the first time will need to have its own checking account. For the past 12 years The Code Zone has been a DBA for me so it's never needed its own account. We'd talked about C-corping it for years, but the advantages never outweighed the costs.
So The Code Zone is gonna expand, at least in that it's gonna get its own account. Wheee.
