BAADAAADAAAAAA BADA DA DA DA. DADAAADAAAAA DAAA DADA DA DA DA.



Right. On to business.



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There's the fruits of my labors for the past two semesters. Beautiful isn't it? Absolutely gorgeous. I never want to see it again.

We've had good times, and bad, me and this game. From the triumph of figuring out a piece of code, the the hair pulling annoyances when things randomly stop working for absolutely no good reason. In a couple hours I go in to present my game, and end this mess. HUZZAH.

ITS THE FINAL COUNTDOWN.

PS: Here's this thing. Seemed kind of pointless.




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Starting off this week's post is a version of my game. It might be the most recent, frankly I don't even know myself anymore. Its the highest numbered one though. There's a second level in it and my attempt at a game over screen. Its a bit buggy however and will require more work.




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Next up is the tutorial for this week. Its the last one ever, YAY! I actually kind of like this one. The tutorial was nice and clean (though it was in Actionscript 3 when everything else we've been doing is in 2) and its fun to play around with. Score.

Please allow me to hum some of my Favorite Things.

This one was cake. I'd been through this particular tutorial before in trying to get my car moving in my original game demo. Sadly it didn't work for me then since my car is symmetrical and just flipping it doesn't fly. Anyway, here is a smiley face for you. DON'T WORRY BE HAPPY (come on be happy now.) DOOOOO DOT DO DOOO DOOO DOO DOOO DI DOOOOO DI DOOOOOO.




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WOOT! This marks the 30th whole post to this blog. Are you as ecstatic as I am?

Anyway in today's post we have......Drag and Drop...annnnnnnnd Platforming! Gasp. Its a special two for one deal. You don't see this kind of deal all the time, ya know.

Here's the main event! Hot Flash Action!




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Link to the file

The above is an updated copy of my game featuring some of the new art. I'm trying to get things lined out and organized so I can start making the new levels. I also changed some of the sounds around. The crash sound is now functional, and I silenced the one on the car moving for the moment. Instead I used the same sound on the intro screen. I may leave it out of the level and play music there instead. Either way I have some work to do in Audacity.

Talking done, on to the new pictures.

Gasp! An unscheduled post! Tremble in fear ye pathetic mortals. Throw your arms up to the heavens and ask "WHYYYYYY"

Well I shall tell you why. Instead of working on other things that I should be working on (oops), I started the art upgrade of my game in preparation of fanning out the levels. That's right. No more floating blocks that represent cards, but instead shaky drawings of vehicles that still require a small bit of imagination to believe.



Its absolutely tiny in the game, but there's the full sized version to show off that awe inspiring detail. Stay tuned for more updates and fixes. Craaaaaaaaazy!

I think people should be allowed to do anything they want. We haven't tried that for a while. Maybe this time it'll work. - George Carlin

Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town. - George Carlin

Okay, with that out of the way, on to more important things. This week we did timers. I'd been looking forward to this since it actually has application in my game. I started with the timer tutorial they gave us, but had some problems with it, so I looked a new one up on Google and found one that worked. The code for the delay tutorial worked, however, and that's what I used on the second frame.

In short, the first frame has a 10 second countdown, and the second has a 10 second delay before it repeats back to the first. Download the .fla to see the working code.




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Okay this was the preloader assignment, which apparently you'll have to download my source file to see because the file's not big enough to require one? I swear its there, and it was rather fun to watch in flash.

This is another assignment that I'm running a bit late on. Between my NIC dying, informative speeches, and power outages, someone up there just wanted to make this one hard for me. Moral of most of this story, save after every five keystrokes. Gr. I've got one more post to get caught up on for this week, and then I'll be back on track. Huzzah.

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Distraction is bad. I'm a bit behind on things so here's the first post of getting caught up. This was the adding sound assignment. We'd already added sound to the mini game before, so we jumped right into putting sound into our games. My logo has a bit of sound on it, and the car makes sound when you move! This has been up on my wiki a couple of weeks, but I'm just now getting to it here.

So continuing on my last post, collision detection.




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If you hadn't guessed yet, I really really reallyx10000000000000 hate the fly catcher thing. The code is edited, its there, but I'm seriously not dealing with the BZZZZTTTT BZZZZTTTTTTT everytime I visit my blog for another month. So, to prove I am doing things I did the little ball bounce animation. Collision detection is pretty central to my game, which, believe it or not, I plan on tinkering with this week. Yay free time!! Its only Saturday and I'm bored already.

In other news, my game of the posting interval is Tetraform. It goes along with the collision thing rather nicely, since the entire point is to make your enemies collide. Enjoy.

Oh, and the title of this post comes from an Andrew Bird song called "A Nervous Tick Motion of the Head to the Left." Good stuff, check it out.

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Not much to say this week. With my game in mind, score keeping is a little different. My character has different lives which you can gain or loose depending on stimulus from the game. Same coding though, I think.

Moving on to Collision Detection. Its the Fly Catcher Tutorial. Again. Amazing! What are we doing to it this time? Adjusting the hitbox on the frog's tongue. Again. Be still my heart. I'm getting really good at changing the hit box on this Frog's tongue. Is the repetitiveness here part of helping us learn? If we are going to do the same thing over and over I would at least like some different examples of it. I'm getting really annoyed at loading my blog to that damn fly buzzing. It seems like every time I get it off the first page we get another assignment to put it right back up there.

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This tutorial kind of sucked. You have to read it pretty carefully or you'll end up duplicating things where they don't need to be duplicated and then things just get all screwed up. The actionscript in the finished copy of the tutorial was nearly impossible to find, and just argh.

It seems like every time I sit down to work on flash something comes up. Today was a virus call from work, 4 hours of scans latter, new computer needed.

Anyway, on to the good stuff. Despite the hold up, I did in fact do some productive things today. However, I do have something to say. "Timeline Effects" does not exist in CS4. The tutorial linked is for FlashMX, are any of the classes using FlashMX? Flash wasn't even an Adobe product then!

So, useful information courtesy of my GoogleFu. In Flash CS4 "Timeline Effects" is now "Motion Presets." Some of them, like drop shadow aren't there anymore, but they've replaced it with some cool, and oh so very smooth movements. You can bring up the dialog box by clicking Winows -->Motion Presets. Click the layer you want to apply the effect to, then choose your effect from the dialog and click "Apply" Voila! It was a little tricky getting it to do exactly what I wanted, but overall, easier than trying to do it myself.

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I went ahead and did a new Motion Guide as well, considering its changed a little bit for CS4 as well. It wasn't too different from the tutorial, just a couple of new names here and there.

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Matt posed some free layouts so I browsed around a little and picked a new one. Huzzah. The new prettiness aside, I'm pretty full of fail this week. I put together a shiny brand new computer, and I'm still trying to get all of my programs on it. So for the moment, that means no flash, but I'm working on it. I should have all sorts of backlogged swf~y goodness to post tonight.

I was productive in the fact that I attempted to clean up the My Projects page on the wiki. I went through and labeled all my flash, and I think things there are good to go. Having to do it all in coding was a little tedious, and I think there's still some changes I should make so that it will read easier. The random redesign of the site last week made it a little hard to match up files with what section they were, hopefully I got them all right.

So, for the things due tonight; Moving on a Path. I used this for the clouds animation on my game demo. Or I tried too. Anyway, I can see some really nice applications of this (other than making people's eyes cross like my animation. Are there three balls or four??)

Special Effects! Awesome fun, but too many makes things tacky and horrible. Most of these effects I've used for things before in Photoshop, and I even managed to slip the transition one in to my game demo last semester too. I may use transition, Drop Shadow, or Blur in the future, but I think I'll be avoiding the others.

Lastly, this week's flash game! Infectonator World Domination! Take over the world with 8-bit Zombies!! What's not to love. I'm seriously a bit addicted to this one. http://armorgames.com/play/5349/infectonator-world-dominator

I kind of fell off the side of the world there for a few days. Being snowed in will do that to a person. So this past week we looked at "Learning from Others" and "Finding Solutions" I found the instructions in the "Learning from Others" section kind of ambiguous considering it says to upload a SWF to the wiki at the end, but we were never given one to edit. I suppose we're just supposed to find a random one somewhere. I'll edit this post with that later tonight. Also, the link to "Assembling the Game" doesn't work.

Finding Solutions! I'll admit I used Google when I was putting my demo together and I was trying to get my car to turn properly. Google is awesome, if you know how to use it. I like the links to the other communities on the page, that might come in handy in the future if my GoogleFu fails me.

So the exercise I messed around with this week was about good programing practices. In general the things that were gone over weren't new information to me. I've done a lot of web design and some other coding in the past, and know that if you don't put things in proper places, or add comments to help you keep track of what the code is doing, things can get messy fast.

The script assist thing on the video was kind of neat. All the actionscript I'd done so far was typing in the code, its nice to see there's a quick library there for some things.

Sadly, I've not really done anything to my game again this week. Things are kind of up in the air as far as game production goes, so I'm waiting to get the final verdict on if we're continuing our old games or doing a new "team" game. Bleh. I don't suppose it matters either way, heh.

Because I do play an inordinate amount of flash games, I figured I'd link in whatever one's kept me amused for the week at the end of my post. Filler? Never.

http://armorgames.com/play/4962/bubble-tanks-tower-defense

Mmmm tower defense games, ftw.

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Link to the file.


Starting off light this semester with a couple of variable changes in the "Intro to Actionscript" assignment. The scuba game is kind of cute.

I was bad and didn't do anything to my game this week. However I did think about it, which is progress. The conditional in the fly catcher tutorial might come in useful later if I want to extend the hit box on the bigger trucks, as was my original plan. That's about all I have for the moment.