gamepixies

Balloons and stuff

2011-11-22T13:32:00.000Z

You may have noticed that we've put up a new version of the "SET" card game. We're quite excited about this because not only is it the first update to Gamepixies in a few years, but it also features balloons (Play the time trial and see).

The web has moved on a lot in the almost five years since we started Gamepixies - I ended up with some time on my hands, about a million things I wanted to do with the site and a heap of web technologies I wanted to play with so it was pretty exciting to build the new version of SET and see what could be done.

We hope you like the new version. If you run an older browser (e.g. Internet Explorer version 8 or below) you may have problems with it. If that's the case, may we suggest getting hold of Google Chrome or Firefox - you'll probably find the whole internet starts looking prettier, birds start singing, etc. but most importantly you'll be able to see our balloons.

To get to the new version, go to the SET game (or time trial) of your choice and click on "Try the new version of SET". It will remember your preference for next time, or you can go back to the old version for now (but it won't be around for ever).

We're still finishing up a few bits and pieces and trying to test it in more browsers - please write below if you have any ideas or comments.

[Update 24/11/11] - We've tested it in a few more browsers and added more features that were in the old version (e.g. support for colour blind users, statistics at the end).

Slitherlink

2008-06-18T17:22:00.000+01:00

We've always felt that, as Japanese puzzles go, Sudoku is highly overrated and Slitherlink is the one that should be on the back page of the paper every day. We often go through phases of being addicted to a particular puzzle, and those phases usually pass after a while, but that doesn't seem to have happened with Slitherlink. So we thought it might be a good idea to put it on our site and let other people make up their minds about it.

There will be a new one generated each day, but be warned that the hard puzzles can take a while (thank goodness we added a pause button).

This is also our first SVG puzzle, the Java/SVG combination worked so well for the games room we didn't see much mileage in continuing with the Canvas versions. Hopefully there will be some more to follow.

Legalities of online games

2008-06-04T18:14:00.000+01:00

Several people have asked if the content on Game Pixies is legal, surely taking someone else's game without their permission and publishing it online breaks some laws? The answer is unfortunately complex, and while we have been granted permission for some of our games, so far we have relied on the fact that no one has taken issue.

It might seem naive to think along the lines of "if it isn't hurting anyone, what is the problem?", but there is also some business sense for publishers and designers to let us do what we do. For a start we provide free advertising to a highly targeted audience. We also provide extremely high quality advertising, not just some static text but a playable version and we are always happy to introduce people to a new game. It is no surprise to us that people have tried games on our site for the first time only to promptly declare they are off to buy it the next day.

Sadly we have just been asked to take down a game, but not without good reason. Knizia Games has just sold exclusive electronic rights to Through the Desert to an undisclosed company. I hope the other company does a nice job of it and bring this great game to more people. It is also promising to see that the online board game market is getting this developed. We wish Through the Desert the best of luck, so long, and thanks for all the great games.

But while we are saying good bye, it is interesting to take stock of our legal position, and some may find it surprising. According to this article there are no copy protections on games. A game's name can be trademarked (and almost always is) and its artwork can be copyrighted, but the ideas and mechanisms of playing a game are not offered any protection at all.

This means that we are under no legal obligation to remove the gameplay, we must simply stop using the name as we already use our own artwork. However, we have removed the game completely because we aim to work with game designers and publishers and can hardly do this if we act against their wishes. This is our first contact with Knizia Games and so it is important to us, hopefully we can now work with them to bring a larger audience to some of their other games, Mr. Knizia has designed many truly excellent games after all.

Getting into the swing of things

2007-11-21T18:38:00.000Z

We have been running gamepixies for nearly two years now. There was very little progress in the beginning - it took a few months to produce our first version of Set! - and it was quite a while after that that we finally came up with a name. There were various reasons for this, like deciding on how the clients were going to work and how the server was going to work, which languages we were going to use (and there was a lot of disagreement on that front), but mostly we just not getting any time to code because we were cycling across Europe at the time.

Thankfully we did settle down, about 6 months ago, and we have been able to do much more work since. A lot of this has been behind the scenes improvements, such as switching our graphics to a persistent document model (which is why the games room has an SVG mode) and rewriting the servers in the same language that we use on the client. But there have been some very visible additions such as the new games and even an AI.

It finally looks like this work is really paying off, we are seeing more people visit the site, and adding new content is getting much easier. So much so that we can now announce a new game, "Through the Desert", which is exciting for us not only because it is one of our favourite board games, but also because we started work on it less than a week ago.

May there be many more to come.

No Thanks!

2007-11-15T13:25:00.000Z

We are pleased to announce a new game on our site: No Thanks!

This is another game that is traditionally used as a filler, because it is easy to learn and quick to play, but despite the very simple rules it has some surprising depth. It is an excellent game for long journeys as there are few pieces and you can explain how to play in under a minute.

Lost Cities AI

2007-10-11T16:08:00.000+01:00

The first AI player is complete and ready to play. It isn't very smart, but it can get lucky so don't expect to win every round (just most of them).

To play against the AI just join the games room and create a new Lost Cities game as normal, after deciding how many rounds you want you are now asked if you want to play the easy AI or a human.

It is quite common in the games industry to strengthen the AIs by letting them cheat. Sometimes they are given unlimited resources, or knowledge of the other players that they just shouldn't have, or just better "luck". We don't think that sort of behaviour is suitable on our site, which is why we would rather present you with an AI that couldn't think its way out of a wet paper bag than provide you with a challenge for all the wrong reasons.

We have some ideas for improving the player, medium AI might make an appearance soon.

In the works

2007-10-08T23:42:00.000+01:00

Here at code pixies we get a lot of feature requests for our games site, whether it is little things like "can you please make it work" to big things like "can you please make it work".

One of the things we have never been asked for the most is computer opponents to play against if there isn't anyone else around. We want them and we are working on them, first for "Lost Cities", and then maybe for "Hey! That's my fish!".

The initial opponent is going to be pretty silly, but hopefully we will one day attain mastery in our field and produce an opponent that is almost competent. So if you see "AI" just remember that in our case it stands for artificial idiocy and try not to lose.

Lost Cities in the Games Room

2007-08-17T18:17:00.000+01:00

It isn't quite as good as having a completely new game on our site, but it is nice to have all our games together, so Lost Cities has been moved into the Games Room to join "Hey! That's my fish!". The most important change is that players will now get email notifications when it becomes their turn - at last!

In the last post I mentioned that Safari should be getting SVG support, and its true, the version 3 public betas work nicely. There were a few other issues with Safari, but they have now been worked around, which means our site now supports it. We would still quite like someone to donate us a Mac though.

Over the next few months we should be working on some more games, one of which is even slightly original.

More fish for more people.

2007-07-10T00:55:00.000+01:00

Although SVG support is quite good (Firefox and Opera have it), some browsers (Internet Explorer and Safari) don't which is just annoying.

But that shouldn't stop you playing "Hey! That's my fish!" any more, as long as you have a decent version of a Java plugin you can now use the new Java version.

Apparently Safari almost very nearly has SVG support, and it is in the nightly beta builds.
If I had a Mac I would try it, anyone feel like donating one?

Happy fishing!

Out with the red

2007-06-28T13:20:00.000+01:00

We are very pleased to announce (although we hope you have already noticed) our new site design. We've been tired with the red for some time and after several failed attempts and hideous lime green / orange concoctions, we decided that programmers do not necessarily make the best designers, and hired a pro to point us in the right direction. The final result is a combination of the designer's chosen colour scheme, dgym's creative efforts in Inkscape (an SVG editor), and my conversion of all that into HTML.

We've also rearranged a couple of the pages - for example, you can see the top ten players when you visit the Time Trial page, and the Old Time Trials page has been made a bit easier to use.

We hope you like the new design as much as we do, and that it will make your time on our site that little bit more enjoyable. If you see anything strange in the design, please do let us know about it, and which web browser you're using.

Fishy Developments

2007-06-21T00:01:00.000+01:00

We have just released a new board game for two to four players: Hey! That's my fish!

Yes, that's right, we have actually added a board game to our board games site. It's a very special occasion.

As normal we are lacking a tutorial or indeed any information about the game at all, but we will add that soon and in the mean time there is plenty of information at board game geek.

For those that have played Lost Cities, the layout for setting up games should be familiar. This new version offers some notable benefits as it is now a central page to manage all our multiplayer games (Lost Cities will be ported at some point). It also loads very quickly because we are not using any plugins, and it updates dynamically even if you are behind a restrictive firewall. This means you should be able to play this game at work, in case you were wondering, out of idle curiosity, hypothetically of course.

The actual game display is also a departure from our traditional methods. Having done some research I have come to the conclusion that drawing using a persistent framework is the way forward. Currently we are using SVG, which is supported by Opera and Mozilla/Firefox, and even Internet Explorer if you have the plugin from adobe. There are some other platforms that should be easy to port to so if you can't play yet you should be able to soon.

There are still plenty of improvements to make, but in the mean time go grab some fish.

30-day average

2007-04-26T00:52:00.000+01:00

If, like us, you are obsessed with seeing how well you're doing on the daily Set time trial, you may have noticed the changes in the way the rankings are calculated.

After putting up the original statistics page, it soon became obvious that, as somebody who has been playing since we started the time trial back in August, and had about 170 times recorded, it would be quite difficult to have any influence over my average score and thus there was very little incentive to play in order to improve my ranking - and although we only really started to get users in January, everybody would be facing that problem sooner or later.

The change involves calculating the ranking from the average time over the last 30 days only. This will give everybody a good chance at improving their average scores and keeps things nice and fresh.

I was a little worried that I might be seen as having an ulterior motive in doing this, but fortunately my times have been rubbish lately so it's pushed my ranking from 4th to 7th. But I do now feel that I have a good chance of clawing my way back up.

Set on the MS JVM

2007-04-17T21:18:00.000+01:00

The Microsoft JVM may be old, no longer supported, no longer distributed and a huge security risk but some people have it and they can now play Set, hurrah!

It also has a pretty poor graphics API so the cards look a bit funny (a bit furry actually), but I hope that ugly Set is better than no Set.

Stats

2007-04-15T22:06:00.000+01:00

I am very pleased to announce the new Set Time Trial Statistics page, which shows the top ten users (based on average times) and the top ten times.

It only includes registered users, so if you'd like to see your name on the top ten page, you will need to create an account (and be good at Set of course).

You can also click the name of any registered user and see their vital Set statistics - best and average times and their overall time trial ranking. Congratulations to Anonymouse, Lyoa and Anony who are the top three players - for now I shall have to humbly take my place at number four.

We hope you like the new statistics page, and if there's any information you think is missing we'd love to hear about it.

PS. Thanks to my wonderful little sister for the top ten idea.

Database changes.

2007-04-13T18:20:00.000+01:00

We recently changed our database system from sqlite to postgres. You won't have noticed much apart from a small amount of site downtime the other night while we moved everything over, but it's another one of those backend changes that makes a world of difference to us and the way we do things.

There are some subtle differences in the way usernames are handled now - if you're not logged in, you can't play Set using the name of a registered user. We're aware that there is a problem with the browser not keeping you logged in (it should be keeping you logged in for the next couple of decades but it seems this isn't working for everybody) - we are looking into this problem.

You may also have noticed that the browsing interface for the old time trials has got a bit prettier, the list of dates was getting a bit long to handle. There will also be some statistics pages coming soon, to show the playing history of registered users.

You can also now subscribe to an Atom feed of the Set Time Trial so you don't forget to do it every day.

It's been great to see the number of people playing the Set time trial break the 20 barrier a couple of times recently, we are growing slowly!

New version of Set

2007-03-16T21:03:00.000Z

The new version of the Set client is now up on the site. On the surface, it's not very different from the old one but to us it is an important step forward, using technology which brings it into line with our puzzles. It is smaller than the old version, resulting in quicker load times, and you might also notice it is faster and more responsive. Perhaps most importantly, it will make it much easier for us to make future changes and improvements.

We hope you continue to enjoy playing Set on the new version - if there are any problems we would like to hear about them, so please post here or email us using the contact link at the bottom of the page.

Light Up and SET

2007-02-27T11:06:00.000Z

Yesterday we added the Light Up (Akari) puzzle to our site. There are only a few puzzles right now but We hope to recreate the SET Time Trial format and have everybody's time displayed on daily puzzles. This is our first release that works on both Java and the Canvas from the outset, and the Canvas version should be a very convenient size for playing on the Wii if you zoom in.

Hel has almost finished the new SET client and it is looking much more responsive. It still won't support MicroSoft's ancient and ailing JVM, but I hope to get that working when I get back from my hang gliding course. Thanks to a suggestion from one of our regular time trial players AVC we should be adding some statistics to the time trial. Hopefully they will give an indication of what sorts of sets you are likely to see and which ones you tend to miss.

There still hasn't been much progress on a Flash version of all our games and puzzles, although I did get something working it could best be described as glacially slow. Depending on the machine you have some might have noticed that the Canvas versions are a little sluggish and I have some work planned to improve them. After that it might be possible to produce a reasonably performing Flash client too.

The inevitable

2007-02-09T11:29:00.000Z

You can hardly have a Japanese puzzle site without Sudoku, so we have have created a player and are making three puzzles available each day, one easy, medium and hard.

I am not a huge fan of this puzzle, preferring those with a spatial aspect such as Filomino, Slitherlink and Bridges, but creating the client was fun as we are just starting to use our latest set of tools. At the moment there is only a Java version available, but, as with Edel, a Canvas version will be made sometime over the next week. We also hope to make Flash versions of all our games and puzzles too.

Any developer would worry about maintaining three separate versions of every client, it would be tedious at best, which is why we have created a platform where we can publish all three versions (maybe even more in the future) from the same code. Flash is programmed in ActionScript, which is very similar to JavaScript which is used to drive the Canvas version. It would be very simple to develop these two versions using the same code, but Java is very different, so in order to target all three platforms we develop in a different language entirely. This language has been designed to be easily implemented, and we have a Java interpreter for it and a program for translating it to JavaScript.

Hel is currently porting the SET client over (it was previously written in Jython), and I am bringing the JavaScript version up to date with the Java version so Sudoku will run using the Canvas. SET on the Canvas poses some unique problems because of the required networking, but we have a potential solution for that too.

Compatibility Issues

2007-02-04T13:02:00.000Z

Every so often we speak to someone who has tried to play our games but the site didn't work for them. While this news is always a little upsetting it is best that we know as it helps us do something about it.

Up until now all our games and puzzles have used Java. SET and Lost Cities are known not to work with old versions of Java, and we are working on fixing this.

Edel should work with any version of Java, but just in case you don't have any version installed, or firewalls are getting in the way (not that you should be playing at work anyway, right?) we are pleased to announce a Canvas version which is almost 100% guaranteed to work with Firefox 2 and Opera 9. Wii testing will be done later today.

For those who can't use Java or the Canvas we are planning on providing Flash versions too, but we need to sort out the SET client first. In the mean time if you are having any problems using our site please leave a comment.

New Domain

2007-01-20T17:14:00.000Z

You might have noticed that the site now takes you to gamepixies.com when you visit. That's because we've finally got a proper domain, hooray! The old one will continue to work, there's no point in dropping it, but the new one is shorter and hopefully easier to remember.

If you were logged in before, the domain changeover will have logged you out. We're sorry about this, and promise not to make a habit of it. Your logon details still work, and you can just log back in again.

Sorry

2007-01-16T21:52:00.000Z

To anybody who did the Set time trial this morning and found it didn't submit your time, we're really sorry about that, we had a bit of a database problem. It's working again now. If it's any consolation this meant I ended up doing the time trial three times, and still ended up half way down the scoreboard. :(

If you got a time you were particularly proud of and want it recorded, please email us via the link at the bottom of the site, or post it below.

Welcome

2007-01-07T11:45:00.000Z

Firstly, we'd like to say hello to all our site users, especially those who come back and play the SET Time Trial day after day - it's great to see the list of names grow, and to see the same names appearing over and over.

Our latest addition to the site is the Japanese puzzle, Edel - you may know it as Hanjie, or Nonograms, or Paint by Numbers, or any of its other dozens of names.

We started thinking about developing Japanese puzzles back in September, having just discovered that the fantastic puzzle.jp site was no more (for those unfamiliar with it, puzzle.jp hosted a range of different Japanese puzzles, with three or four new ones every day).

It's been a long time coming as we've been travelling and we also have to freelance to keep ourselves fed, but it's great to finally have something to show.

There's been one major problem - as Edel materialized, it became apparent that it's much harder to create puzzles than we'd anticipated. Sure, you can put any old picture in there, but it's not necessarily solvable, and it's very hard to get it to the desired level of difficulty - which is why there are only a couple of puzzles at the moment. Hopefully we'll get better at creating puzzles as time goes on, and perhaps you can help us too because we hope to soon release a Composer for Edel - which will allow anybody to create and publish a puzzle for other users to solve.

We hope you enjoy playing Edel, and we look forward to bringing you more fun stuff very shortly.

We have created this blog not just as a place for us to ramble on about our site, but also for you to have your say - so if you are having any problems with the site, or any suggestions for what you'd like to see in future, or just want to say hello, please do post a comment.