Thinking In Hex

I completed my substr("LAMP",2,2) project earlier this week and sent out an email to everyone I thought might be interested in seeing it. The comments so far have been positive and in particular the two techie's that have looked at it so far have had complimentary things to say.

My next project is going to be to create a "click management" game entirely in javascript. The end goal here is to get to where I can use AJAX and javascript is a big part of that. Also, I wanted to make a real game. The earlier project (S.Rex War) wasn't really a game.

So, the concept for this new project is going to be a "click-3" game with one twist. Most click-3 games I've seen have been done with a basic x-y coordinate system. I'm going to attempt to make a minor variation on the concept and have it play off of a hex grid.

So far, I've been focusing on fleshing out what the overall code will look like. My experience with the "Cryptic Rotating Block Test" reinforced the idea that you should plan before getting into the actual coding.

The most difficult problem so far has been trying to figure out how to easily represent a hex grid using a Cartesian coordinate system. It's been a real pain but I think I finally have a pretty nifty solution. Oddly enough, I've seen this solution before and it very much reminds me of a three-component phase equilibrium diagram.