24 hours in, and we’ve actually turned it into a game. Using some nice HTML tricks to layer everything correctly, we now have an options screen:

It’ll fade in and out as you want. When you actually start playing, all of the instructions fade out:

I actually had to spend a few hours re-factoring here too, unfortunately. Originally, I had everything as ‘threaded’ as JavaScript can get, with setTimeout chains for each tile, along with for controls. Unfortunately, I was getting a bit of an issue with synchronization, so I had to make it single threaded. Amusingly, that’s a bit harder in JavaScript, but it worked out for the best.

And then at the end, I spent a few hours making the scoring look nice. You can’t see it here, but there’s a nice animation running from the bottom to the top of each player counting up the total types of sand. At the moment, the overall most sand wins, but I’m probably going to play with that.

And that’s it. It’s going pretty well.

For a full demo and the rest of the write up (along with a fully playable demo!), check out the full length post on my blog: Ludum Dare 30: 24 hours @ jverkamp.com.