Kick, Drop, Cancel Game

Today I implemented kicking, dropping, and canceling games. This should make things more smooth during play and give everyone more control.

Below is the new view for a host, which gives him/her a link to send to people playing the game.



This is a shot of what a non-host will see in-game. Notice the new "drop" link to the right of the person's name.



This is a shot of the host in-game. He/she can kick players or cancel the game entirely.


I haven't tested what happens when someone kicks or drops the controlling/current player. That still needs to be tested further.

Auto Register Implemented

Today I implemented an auto-register feature for Facebook users. It will automatically create an account in the Thirteen game site without the user having to enter their credentials. Since the user has no opportunity to enter credentials, I'll have to implement a user profile page where the user may edit their credentials. 

Layout Changes

I made a big layout change due to an inspired comment from Yin, that the card blocks seemed strange and unintuitive. Behold the new layout:

Kosal's Comments

Kosal provided the most feedback of anyone so far, describing some layout modifications and minor changes that I agreed would really improve playability of the game. Some of the updates:

• New Players Box which shows who is in control, who's turn it is, how many cards each person has, and the last hand they played.
• Removed unnecessary Select All and Select None boxes.
• Changed the layout so that the cards are smaller, so there is room for the players box and history.

I still have several more of his recommendations to implement, but I am making good progress. Here's a screenshot of the current build:

Continuing Progress

I've made progress on a number of fronts thanks to the encouragement received from various friends who have been helping me to test the app. Thanks a bunch to:

• Grace
• Kosal
• Lisa
• Priscilla

Some notes:

• Implemented more accurate Thirteen rules by removing requirement for user in control to pass to clear the controlling hand.
• Show only games which have not begun or in which the current user is a player.
• Grace found a weird error where the diamond symbol appears as a box. This is frequently indicative of some encoding problem, but I cannot reproduce it.
• Added instructions at the bottom of the page.
  

Ajax Refreshing

Today I finished implementing FB's Ajax method of reloading DOM content to make the game more user friendly. In the non-FB version, I just refresh the page every 5 seconds. This is, of course, an inelegant solution, but it works.

I am finding it very troublesome debugging the Facebook app. The silver lining is that it has given me new insights on how to build my next application.

Still to do is to implement Ajax refreshing on other pages besides the play-page.

Game Over!

Today I implemented some more code surrounding a game over event. Originally, I would simply delete the serialized game object from the database, which would be confusing for players. Instead, I am now setting a game-over flag and leaving the game in the database. This may be useful in the future to analyze human matches when I begin to work on the AI portion again.

The task was especially hairy due to some issues over how AI players affect the game differently than a Human player does. I had to refactor the code a good deal to incorporate AI players so there were still snags here and there.