AJ's Place

Its the Final Countdown.

2010-05-11T12:23:00.000-07:00

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

Right. On to business.

Link to the file

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.

Link to the file

Enemies galore!

2010-04-27T14:19:00.000-07:00

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.

Link to the file

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.

Running and Jumping and......

2010-04-22T14:46:00.000-07:00

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.

Link to the file

POST NUMBER 30

2010-04-22T14:42:00.000-07:00

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!

Link to the file

Link to the file

VRRRRRROOOOOOM

2010-04-16T18:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Interlude

2010-04-14T18:06:00.000-07:00

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!

Does the time bother you?

2010-04-13T12:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Link to the file

Imma Chargin My Lazers!

2010-04-08T09:03:00.001-07:00

Link to the file

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.

Getting caught up....again.

2010-04-08T07:44:00.000-07:00

Link to the file

Comments

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.

We're what happens when two substances collide...

2010-03-13T19:42:00.000-08:00

So continuing on my last post, collision detection.

Link to the file

Comments

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.

Score Keeping+ Fly Catcher? Again!?

2010-03-09T11:56:00.000-08:00

Link to the file

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.

Frustration!!

2010-03-04T15:18:00.000-08:00

Link to File

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.

Getting caught up!

2010-03-02T15:02:00.000-08:00

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.

Link to the file

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.

Link to the file

Layouts Layouts Layouts

2010-02-25T12:52:00.000-08:00

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'm Late!!

2010-02-12T11:28:00.001-08:00

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.

Comments!

2010-02-02T11:57:00.000-08:00

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.

First Post of the Semester!

2010-01-25T12:22:00.000-08:00

Link to the file

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.

Video

2009-12-03T11:04:00.001-08:00

Final Project, Woo!

2009-12-01T15:17:00.000-08:00

So here's my game intro, finally right? The following bit of animation contains a logo the intro screen, the info screen, and a sample level. Basically what I had done for the paper prototype video, but in flash form.

The Final (Or Only because I'm lazy) Rant

2009-11-30T16:46:00.000-08:00

So, here it is, my long awaited final post to this blog for the semester. You have no idea how overjoyed I am at the prospect of this. Tomorrow evening I'll be giving my presentation thing, so tonight I'm making sure everything is in order to go. I won't say that this semester hasn't been interesting, though I think a better word for it is entertaining. From BSing answers to questions on the wiki, to getting an introduction to flash its been a bit of a ride. I kind of look forward to seeing the things my classmates will come up with to say tomorrow night.

This course has been an interesting, but somewhat failing lesson in collaboration. At least, I hope collaboration was the point of all this blogging and wiki-ing we've been doing. In reality, very little collaboration has gone on outside of the classroom making the blogs and wikis seem to be very useless. I see the point in this kind of work, but don't agree with the way its currently being implemented.

The way things are working, as I understand it, is the class is focusing more on blogging and wiki-ing than it is on the actual game creation process. By just looking at some of the blogs I found links to you can see this focus. They are more personal journals, filled with random comments such as sport scores, or what the author is doing that day. Even the ones that are more on topic (including my own) are rife with simple entries of "Today we _______." The end. This isn't collaboration, this is parroting to get a grade.

I feel that too much emphasis has been placed on the quantity of posts instead of quality. Where's the sharing of neat bits of code you found while trying to figure out how to make your character move? Where's the actual work you did in class? The source files? Where are the comments? Where is the proof that someone else is reading these posts?

Along this quantity train of thought, there's the question of equality. How can you hold a college level student, who meets in the lab once a week for a little over two hours equal to a middle or high school student who meets for an hour and a half or so daily for five days a week? The same teaching patterns really don't seem to work with the two groups. I wonder why?

The point of this is, while I think the class has a good idea to it, I don't believe it is a good use of time (and in a college student's case, money) in its current format. If you're going to put such a great emphasis on collaboration, then make sure there's collaboration. Inter-campus groups via skype or the blogs or the wikis for little projects, or something. At least some communication through a medium other than the course instructor! Otherwise, leave me alone and teach me flash, that's what I came for.

More Progress

2009-11-17T15:30:00.000-08:00

I've been working pretty hard these past few weeks getting my demo ready to go. I'm really happy with how things are looking so far. I have one or two background screens left to make and some boundries to set, but the car moves on WSAD and turns with Q and E, and the hit test and scoreboard seems to be working!

I think for the rest of the demo I want a just watch level/movie and the game over screens. Maybe some sound. It depends on how far I get tonight with my "movie" level.

Nothing Shiny

2009-10-27T17:35:00.000-07:00

I have absolutely nothing shiny to put in here tonight to show for my incredible amount work. Alas.

Anyway, I spent tonight setting up the second screen of my game, and trying to get clouds to move when everything else is stopped. So far I'm pretty much unsuccessful at getting it to work. I'm going to have to play with it some more if I can manage to get some lab time before next week.

Aside from that setback, I'm really happy with the way things are going so far. The intro screen and the information screen look pretty awesome. I think I'm going to try and add a logo to the beginning really quick. Hrmm. Brb.

Am I hearing things?

2009-10-13T16:56:00.001-07:00

Link to the file.

Link to the file.

So I kind of fell off the world for a couple weeks. Sorry. Well I'm back with a vengeance. You may be able to tell from the post above that we worked on sounds last week. We added a really annoying howl to the wolf, and then had to go back to our jokes again and add some sort of sound. All my buttons make this weird clicking sound now. Its awesome. Feel my enthusiasm abound.

Aside from that we worked on our paper prototypes, of which my video is still uploading. I've been number 23 in queue for a good half an hour now. Viddler is awesome. Check out my wiki page for more information on the game front (and for blinding boxes of green).

Finally we made logos. Mine's pretty simple but it came out kind of pretty. I can never make cool stuff when I need to, just has to be kind of spontaneous. I decided to not put ShinRa Electric Company on my logo despite my team name. Even I can only be so geeky in a point of time. And just now I changed my mind on which logo I was going to use to a photoshop thing I did a while back. Its prettier. Seriously. I'll find the PSD file this week and fix it up to be more logo like.

Update yay!

2009-10-13T14:01:00.000-07:00

Okay so I've fallen a bit behind again. These past couple weks have been dedicated to getting details about my game all sorted out. I've drawn a few slides and created a couple of paper prototypes of various screens in the game. I think my level screen came out really well. My construction paper cars move quite nicely over my string pathways. Its a little odd to look at, but the fuctionality is pretty awesome.

I still have some work left to do on the crash and "yay you win!" screens, but I'm pretty confident that I'll get it worked out. The only thing I'm having issues with at the moment really is the "real world resources."

More Flash

2009-09-29T17:04:00.001-07:00

So I was a little ahead tonight and had already done the collision detection and scorekeeping on my "bunny" example. (Pleased note that my bunny just so happens to be a blue square, oops.) So I moved on to another assignment, where we edited a frog game. My version of the game is pretty easy. Those bugs have to be nowhere near the frog to get him.

Tuesday Night Class, More trippy balls

2009-09-22T17:28:00.000-07:00

Watch the movie closely! Are there three balls or four?

Tonight we covered a bunch of material. First we had a group discussion about our games. A post concerning my game will come up a bit after this one. I did a little updating to the wiki before class so I was ready to start my basic pitch.

After talking about everyone's games we learned a little about the motion guide tool, and I went a little crazy with it. After that we started the mini game tutorial. As the assignment we just had to have an object that moved, and one that we could control, so click the movie below to control the square. I took it a little further and added the hit control and the scorekeeping. Awesome.

The drawing tool!

2009-09-15T17:31:00.000-07:00

So today we messed around with the pen and pencil tools, then took a paper drawing and then traced it in flash. I think that my flash one actually looks a great deal better than my hand drawn one. I've always had an easier time manipulating things on a computer, so oh well. Getting the anchor points to do exactly what I wanted them to was a little tricky, and in some places it still isn't quite right. It's just something that will bet better with practice, I'm sure.

Me, being the geek I am did a quick sketch of the Starfleet emblem. Woohoo.

After I did that, I attempted to morph the first emblem into another version of it with limited success. I ran into the biggest issue with the right leg, which is supposed to be shorter than my final product. Oh, well.

New and improved buttonized Bar Joke.

2009-09-08T17:31:00.000-07:00

Don't bust a gut from laughing so hard.

Acutal Content!

2009-09-04T22:04:00.001-07:00

Right, so I'm way behind with this. Hi, I'm Allison, 23 year old student at Southern West Virginia Community and Technical college. I'm really bad at writing things about myself, never really see the point.

So far the class has been pretty interesting. I really do wish we met more than once a week so I had more time to play with my flash animations. That last one has a weird little seizure that happens every 50 seconds or so. Watching it, I think I programed something into the paladin that I shouldn't have. The pathways of the balls in the first one could have been better with a little more time too.

This past week we learned a bit about buttons (which I need to edit into my story still as well). Not really much to say other than yay, basic building blocks and yay flash. Action Script doesn't look too difficult so far, just a lot of little ; and {} and such to remember.

Uhh that's it for now.

Story Time

2009-09-01T16:20:00.001-07:00

A paladin walks into a bar and approaches a warlock. He asks the warlock for some food, and the lock says "I'm not a mage, I can't do that." The paladin says "Well give me some water." And the lock replies, "I'm not a damn mage, I can't do that." "Well! Sorry for thinking you were useful!" the paladin exclaims. The warlock glares and suddenly pushes the paladin over. From the floor the paladin growls, "What did you do that for?" In reply, the warlock grinned, "Well! Sorry for thinking you could tank."

Now in Flash!!

Get the file!

First Flash Try

2009-08-25T17:51:00.000-07:00

Link to the trippy balls!

Kind of messy, but not to bad for the first try, eh?