The Game: Case 8 - Items, Arrays and Counters

Allright, things are looking better, and I'm catching up to myself, so to speak. I sat up last night till three o'clock and finished up case 8.

Case 8 - In this case you have to create objects for your hero to pick up and get some kind of "points" for. The points are to be added to a counter and shown on-screen consecutively. You will also create objects that your hero should avoid. The hitting of such an object should somehow also be made apparent on-screen.

Firstly, I have begun redoing the previous level design to be more in touch with the game's "story", which can be read in its entirety on my group's Wiki Site. You now play in a desert town/city. Although I really liked the cave level design, the desert is also starting to look pretty neat. I may also revisit the cave theme if I decide to make another level in my game, either before or after this project is officially over.

Secondly, Case 7 is now also completed, and the brute follows the hero around nicely when he gets too close. When in touch, he stops and punches at him with his ginourmous fist. This still leaves a lot to be desired for my game though, and I have promises to keep, and miles to go before i sleep. Combat system is up next, and I need to make proper hit-detection, damage calculations, death animations and more fight animations for the hero.

In other news, Case 8 seemed to be easy in theory, but was harder to implement than I thought. After having been introduced to the Case on Monday, not much was done on my part to complete it, as I had my hands full with the previous case. Adding to the trouble is the fact that my game is now a side-scroller, which complicates the movement of objects A LOT. Finally, after looking over Anders' script on thursday, I understood how to easily communicate between ActionScript-files, and got stuff handled. This also helped me create the Item class, and helped me along in Case 8. The lab on thursday was also a great asset to understanding Arrays and Timers, and how to use them in your script.

What I've done:
First, I created a symbol containing a small "bobbing" animation of a water pouch. Adding this to the stage through the script in multiple instances, I pushed it into an array and defined the points where the items should appear. This makes it easy to add or remove more items later. Then I made the hero able to pick the items up by touching them. The act of doing so adds water to the newly designed User Interface's "water-bar". The bar depletes as time goes on, and complete depletion of the bar means the screen will rapidly go black and you will lose. Also, there is a counter whichs counts how much water you have.

   Not pictured: The counter for my game

What I've learned:
1. As I've already experimented with timers for my combat system in-the-making, I mostly learned about Arrays and For loops this week. They are extremely useful if you can understand the small amount of slightly more intricate code, and will save tons of space in your script files.
2. Generally, I've learned that practice makes perfect. Scripting is hard, but if I stick it out, I can make things happen. It takes time, but the effort is worth it in the end.

If things go after plan, I might upload an early beta version of the game in the following week. If not, I might just withhold it until the game's actual "release", to make it more exciting. I could use a couple beta testers though. Is that something you might be interested in? If so, leave a comment.
Toonsta out!