hey rackham .
Definitely the game is funny, and does look professional .
When I was playing my girlfriend even told me to send the link to her sister .
I can’t think of anything yet to improve, but why the prize restriction to UK ?
Hiya, glad you think the game is fun!
Re the prize restriction, im not sure about the laws internationally regarding giving money away, the game dosent count as gambling or anything in the UK and most of the US (minus a couple of states i think) but i cant afford to get a lawer to tell me the international situation, maybe i will post a question in the biz section!
Thanks for the feedback.
IANAL, but you should be good in most of the US, as long as you don’t require the player to provide anything of value to enter. If they have pay for the game, give food to your favorite charity, whatever… then they are paying for the chance to win, and that puts it under the gambling laws.
Very polished, and rather good fun! It did take me a while to figure out how to play though. Even after reading the instructions twice, I didn’t realise that you could ‘swap’ blocks when dragging them left and right. (The game’s a lot harder without that!)
Just out of curiosity, does anything stop someone writing a program to play the game automatically? Not something I’m planning to do of course, and I imagine it would be rather a lot of work, but when prize money’s on offer…
Simon
Hiya, ive heard that one a few times, i will update the instructions to make them clearer, a lot of people having touble with the swapping element!
Nothing to stop someone to write a program to emulate the users actions, the code is (well should be) obfuscated so it would have to either invovle un-obfuscating it or writing a program to read the visual state of the game and play it, which would be a lot of effort when it comes down to it. Im relying on the same premise that trys to stop forging money, ie if it costs more to make it than what you will gain what’s the point! The amount of time it would take someone to write a program like that just wouldnt be worth the bother!
If you’re super paranoid, you’ll also want to secure network communication between your applet and the score server. Otherwise someone with a packet sniffer can just pick apart the packets for the high score submission. At very least I’d use ssl for everything, since $$$ is involved. 
I have thought of that! Whilst not using SSL it should be fine, if anyone wants to try and submit a false score let me know, be a good test of my solution (to see if it works or not!), sniff away!
Ive changed the instructions on the game, if anyone could have a look and let me know if its any clearer that would be great, thanks!
doy ou sue mysql database with php for the highscore.
and if so. Make sure taht you dont have the password in the source code. Just ahve it hardcoded into teh php script.
only problem is taht someone can decompile your game, get the php url. And the send false urls.
It aint too hard to fake it.
No php, pure Java/JSP on my server (Tomcat), there are a few things going on behind the scenes so false submission of scores by the manner of packetsniffing or decompiling of any client-side code should be easily differentiated from real score submission. Thanks for the tips though!
yeah, if you use jsp.It might be harder. does jsp pass the variables along in url, or like a socket? either way, it can be falsified.
and I dont think there are any fool proof ways to stop decompiling and packetsniffing. if you send a marker. They can just decompile and then see the algorithm you use.
if you got another method please share(unless it is a secret :P).
Can’t fault the instructions. Pity there’s no way of making sure the player reads them.
Simon
you could. just have a boolen readInstructions, which gets set true when you go to the instructions.
games dot aht all of the time
Sure it does do that, as in the instructions should pop up before the player gets to the game whatever route they take, but a lot of people just click skip or play strait away without reading, i imagine that is what you ment dishmoth?
in a nutshell, a record of each game is kept on the server when the game starts, the gameplay info from the client is serialised and sent over a standard HTTP connection, and then verified aginst the initial game orientation, so really it’s not the scores that are being passed back but the gameplay, so packetsniffing will be of no avail unless you can replace the info with legal gameplay info, which you could falsify by picking apart the code and plugging a load more code into it, but it would be a lot of work, it would be a LOT easier to obtain the high score by playing the game 
There are a couple of other small things too but i might keep them as my trade secrets, but ive described the main stuff there.
Ta
rackham
Yep, there’s a big difference between seeing instructions and reading them.
Apologies if I haven’t been paying enough attention, but the old instructions were one-page long while the new version is three pages, yes? Presumably it’s the short version that you’re forcing on the player at the start of the game?
Simon
no it’s the longer one, but i tried to include more visual examples and make it clearer / cover the things people were confused about, do you think ive made it worse? It’s very challenging the art of getting information across quickly!
you going to have trouble making people read 3 pages before they play your game :P.
and yaeh dismoth, I get waht you mean now.
The longer instructions are better, but keeping things down to a single page for the ‘quick start’ guide wouldn’t be a bad idea.
That said, you could be giving lessons in high-quality game presentation, so you don’t have to take anything I say too seriously.
Simon
well i dont know about that but ill take the complement, thank you! 8)
i just need to get some users on the site now (or advertisers if anyones interested!)
You could try asking around at Indiegamer. That site’s a lot more money-oriented than this one.
Simon