Countdown has dropped!
I used the solo version previously posted here as a starting point. Adding multiplayer, as the game is meant to be played, posed some interesting challenges, but implementation was fairly straightforward. The most challenging part was the screen layout during the truly multiplayer portions, where all four players need to share the screen.
I’m looking forward to refining the underlying mechanics behind the game. I ported algorithms written by Christopher Jennings[1] to MakeCode. They’re good algorithms, and the algorithm for solving the numbers rounds uses recursion in a very nice way. I want to redo those implementations, though, so that they can be paused and resumed, essentially pre-empting them so that the game update routines run in a timely fashion (which should get rid of the stutter while the background music is playing).
I also probably should rewrite my typed arrays implementation to take advantage of MakeCode’s builtin Buffer data structure. It may help with the performance of loading the word lists.
Have fun!