Tapping ahead
When I saw this I could hardly wait to get home to buy it! 🙂
Alice and the melting clock were awesome. I have seen some other melting clocks since then, but even with much fancier Macs than my 128, no of them are as smooth and pretty as that one.
My one disappointment with Alice for the iPhone, unless I just haven't found them yet, are some of the other options. E.g. upside-down board and mirror clicking (click left to move right). Also there was an option where the holes were permanent, so the board eventually disappeared.
(I also seem to have a hard time getting it to respond to my finger taps, so that by the time Alice finally moves it's too late, and you can't tap ahead. 🙁 )
(I was hoping the eyes/ears/nose/smile would do something, but I haven't had any luck there either.)
You certainly can tap ahead or otherwise the game was unplayable. I'm curious why you don't feel you can. One of the purposeful difficulties with the game is if you click to an illegal move square and then click ahead after that assuming the first square was good, you will often end up stalled and capture will ensue.
As for the sensitivity, I actually go to great pains to make the clicks do something. When I first coded it, I did the strict bounds testing on the squares but quickly realized I had to respond with the closest square because the taps are notoriously inaccurate. Then, I added a small amount of cheating which biases the clicks towards squares that capture opponents. So, at lower levels <24, you can miss the square by almost almost one whole square and it'll still take the best move. (At higher levels it's less forgiving) The easiest way to see this is to capture all but one piece, get captured, hope you revive on a square that can attack the last piece, and then click on various squares near the piece.
That said, there's always room for one more bug, so if you've got a reproducible case, let me know and I'll rev the app if I can figure something out. I sometimes felt like it missed a click but every time I instrumented it, it turned out I was clicking on an illegal move as mentioned above.
Finally, as for the missing modes in the original Alice: I reviewed them and concluded they were throw aways and didn't really add that much... Except for the trap door which I put in all the time. I changed it slightly in that the trap door will jump locations only on your click so if will sometimes deviously move just when you jump for it. The Mac game's trap door jumped around at random and only rarely did it disappear at just the wrong moment.
As for easter eggs in general, I posted a little musing about this WRT version 1 vs. version 2 on my
blog yesterday.
