The joys of a long weekend

Got some work done this weekend - labor day has been good to me. I got the advanced pieces finished in blender and started in on a hints system.

The pieces came together faster than I had expected, and I have come to realize that I was dreading the fight with Blender more than I realized. I was avoiding the project. I am glad to get over that hurdle!

At Clay's suggestion, I added in a feature to show possible moves to people who were stuck. Right now, it scans the current selector through the whole grid, in every orientation to see whether there are moves. Whenever it finds a working move, it picks one square at random from the four selected and starts it spinning.

Clay's original suggestion was to make this happen when the player does a three finger double-tap. However, I am finding that this interferes with the single-finger double-tap that is used to make a selection, usually resulting in a scratch. It also sometimes got interpreted as a swipe, selecting the next chip. I think I will change the controls so that a horizontal three-finger swipe passes the selector, and a vertical three-finger swipe shows the hint. I may also have the spinning "time out" after a little while.

I still need to balance the difficulty level - the rings are a non-issue in the game - they disappear too quickly. At the same time, I don't want to stress out the beginning player.

I have a couple of lingering bugs: the spinning chips don't fall inwards when the time runs out, and occasionally don't stop spinning when there is a new selector. But we are closing in!