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