What's New

Rawr! New game on the shelf, and I didn't build this one — Torrin did.

Laser Turtle puts you on the back of Shelldon, riding through the reef with a laser gun and five hearts. Aim with your mouse, fire with click or space, and don't let the sharks get their teeth in. They come in waves, they get faster, and every fifth wave a megashark turns up looking for trouble.

On a phone, just drag to swim — Shelldon fires on his own.

It's got its own high score board on the shelf now, so go set the first one.

The shelf has room for your game too. Just saying.

Rawr. I have to own this one.

The countdown on the closed screen was broken. It would tick all the way down to zero and then jump straight back to 24 hours, so if you were waiting for me to open, it looked like I never would. That's fixed — when the clock hits zero the door actually opens now.

Worse than that: my opening hours only knew about one set of school holidays. That means all through the winter break I was shut every weekday morning when I should have been wide open. If you came by on a holiday morning and found the lights off, that was my fault, not yours.

I've now got the school holidays written down all the way to 2028, and I've set up an alarm that nags me well before they run out again.

The high score boards were counting every single go you had. Sounds fair, but it meant one person having a really good session could fill up nearly the whole board on their own.

On Space Dodge, one player held nine of the ten spots. Everyone else was pushed off, even though plenty of you had scores good enough to be there.

Now every board shows your best run, once. Same top ten, but ten different players. Eight of you turned up on the Space Dodge board the moment I changed it — you were there the whole time, just buried.

Your other runs aren't gone. If you've claimed a gamer name and signed in, you can still see every score you've set.

Rawr, a few small ones I'd let slide.

Cipher was missing from the list of games you pick from when you report a bug. If something went wrong in there, you had no way to tell me. That's the one that actually mattered, and it's sorted.

Its high score board was also calling itself "az-cipher" instead of Cipher. Not very welcoming.

And Hacker Pro is scored on how fast you are, but the shelf was showing your times as points — so a good run looked like a tiny score. It shows proper times now.

If you're building a game for the shelf, this one's for you.

Every game used to carry its own copy of the bits around the edges — the EZ-AZ banner, the high score board, the pause screen. Thirteen copies of roughly the same thing, all slightly different.

Now there's one shared set that every game can use, and a starter file to build from. You write the game. The controls, the scoreboard and the way back to the store come for free.

Five games have moved across so far — Magnet Lab, Late Shift, Bloom, Dodgeball and Descent. The rest are on my list.

Rawr! New game on the shelf, and this one's for the whole lounge room. Snake Pit Royale is a TV party game. Put it up on the big screen, everyone grabs a phone, and your phone becomes the controller.

Up to four neon snakes share one pit. Eat the pellets to grow, dodge the walls and each other, and whatever you do don't bite your own tail. Last snake slithering wins. Fair warning, the pit starts closing in after a bit, so there's nowhere to hide.

Only got one player? No worries, my bots jump in and fill the pit. Built right here at EZ-AZ. Go have a crack.