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Serpentine Blog

Improvements in Serpentine Solver lead to more/better rooms - By: Adam Plumb - 16.2 years ago
I found a way to drastically improve the performance of my Serpentine board solver (the program that finds all valid words in a board), and the result is that we can now have 6x6 rooms with 5-letter minimums. The improvement went from about 60 seconds to solve a 6x6 board to about .15 seconds (yes that is a big change), which means that the number of rooms is much less important.

I've taken some recommendations to heart and have switched up the room system a bit to incorporate the suggestions. Let me know how you feel about the changes!

NOTE: As of today my nickname is "adamplumb" instead of "Atticus" so people can know who I am more easily.

Added a winner message, and remote control - By: Adam Plumb - 16.2 years ago
The more I play Serpentine with folks, the more features I remember from my Tangleword days. Indeed, one such feature is the winner message that shows up after each round. This is a message that says "Player XYZ has won the round!" Well, I kind of missed it so I added it in to the game.

In addition, I've added a "Your Stats" table to your account information so that you can see your game information in one place. When more games are added, this will be more useful. I'm also thinking about adding more types of stats.

Finally, I've been needing to write a remote client that I can use to control the server, and today I made my first steps to do so.

Small bug fix for the lobby chat - By: Adam Plumb - 16.2 years ago
After I introduced the lobby chat feature yesterday, I realized that I had not finished the implementation. Unfortunately, when players quit their browser it kept thinking they were still there. The fix was simply to have the server check which players were still sending messages, and if they weren't remove them from the list of players still there.
Lobby Improvements and Game Tweaks - By: Adam Plumb - 16.2 years ago
I'm really happy to see that people are starting to come in and play Serpentine. It seems like there are a lot of disgruntled Tangleword players that have been looking for a good replacement, and Serpentine might be it.

There were some changes that I'd like to mention:

  • You can now chat in the lobby, before you enter the actual game.
  • The words box should hopefully scroll now when the "Other Players Words" listing shows up
  • I've added server chat messages like, "Adam has entered the game" or "Jenny has left the game"
People have been asking for the ability to rotate their letter boards, and since I agree that this is a useful feature it is coming. You can probably expect it within a week or so.
Fun Serpentine Improvements - By: Adam Plumb - 16.3 years ago
Just this morning I was thinking I had exhausted all of my ideas on Serpentine, and then I realized later on how much more was still left to do! Here is a short list of changes since this morning.
  • Added additional intermediate and advanced rooms, with 5 letters per side, and rounds lasting three minutes each.
  • Added a "Words others got" listing after each round, where is shows you all the words the other players got but you didn't
  • A color-coded ratings system. There are now a whole range of ratings groups, from "Needs Improvement" to "Senior Master".
  • The Serpentine letters are now clickable like buttons
  • Some minor bugfixes in the game and server
  • More ratings tweaking
Boring administration type changes - By: Adam Plumb - 16.3 years ago
This morning's work was mostly focused on boring administrative changes, like setting up a basic blogging tool (what I'm writing this in now), adding some basic logging/reporting functionality, and adding a page that lets me view/administer the people that have registered accounts. All pretty basic website stuff, but nothing really new for the users, except for some small tweaks that aren't worth mentioning.

The big thing right now that I want people to watch out for is the ratings system. Yeah it works, but it's pretty experimental, and I'm going to be tweaking it for a while to try to get it just right. The purpose of the ratings system is really to show you how you stack up against others, and to make it so really experienced players can't go into the beginner room(s) and tear the place up. I have a plan to separate ratings up into groups, like beginner, intermediate, and advanced, but I'm thinking of giving the group names a more snakey/dragony theme. Suggestions are always appreciated!

A few testing updates. - By: Adam Plumb - 16.3 years ago
Thanks go to daemonic, shuggycouk, and alex for being brave and helping me with some very early testing yesterday. They found a bunch of issues that I had either ignored or not seen or not been able to test by myself. While I haven't fixed everything just yet, I've fixed a few issues:
  • Was constantly getting an "Invalid Response from Server" popup during the game.
  • An extra comma (hopefully) will not show up in the players listing
  • Chat/Player/Word listing windows now (should) scroll automatically
  • I've reworked the player/chat windows to be bigger and format better with different inputs
  • Added a "Leave" button, so that you get immediately logged out of the game (not the site though)
  • Tweaked the rating system
  • Now displaying game rules in the lobby of the game
  • Displaying a top 10 list of players in the lobby (based on rating)
I'll be setting up some bug/issue tracking software sometime soon.

Finally, I started some initial planning/work on the next game hopefully coming to the site, called Hiss. It's a play on the real name (that I heard of through jenny), Boo. The idea of the game is you have a few players in a match. The first player starts with a single letter, then the next player has to add a letter to that, and so on. Then it goes around and around until they've either created an invalid word or completed a valid word (and there are no more valid words). It should be quite fun, and will let me set up some new server logic for creating/joining matches that I didn't have to do for Serpentine.

Welcome to games.cobradragon.com! - By: Adam Plumb - 16.3 years ago
Once upon a time there was a wonderous website called playsite.com that brought me great joy. It provided free, well-structured, multiplayer word, puzzle, board, and card games. In addition, it kept track of ratings and allowed players to interact with eachother outside of the games. I was personally addicted to the Tangleword and Gomoku games, the former of which inspired this site. Indeed, I was so inspired that I pretty much copied the rules and structure of the Tangleword game to create my game, which I call Serpentine.

You may be wondering about the bizarre snakey-type names on this site. What started out as an inside joke between my girlfriend, Jenny, and I, has blossomed into a full-on obsession with the Cobra Dragon theme. Hence the name of the site, and the name of my first game: Serpentine.

The rules of Serpentine are exactly as you may or may not remember them from Tangleword. There is a 4x4 (or 5x5) sized board of random letters. You, as the player, must find as many valid words from consecutive letters (side-to-side or diagonal touching) as possible. Each word must be at least three letters, for which you get one point. Each additional letter beyond three will net you an extra point (i.e. a five letter word gets you 3 points). In addition, if you are the first person to get a certain word, you get a one point bonus! The game runs in roughly two minute rounds, with a short intermission between rounds. Furthermore, I've also carried over the ratings system from playsite.com, such that each player starts with a rating of 1200, and that rating will increase or decrease based on your score and rating relative to the other players in the room.

One final thing I wanted to mention is that Serpentine is the first of what I hope are many games to come. I have a real fondness for multiplayer puzzle/word/card games, and you can expect these to show up as I make them.


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