Entry 4 - Problems w/ my project

I haven’t posted any new entry on my journal yet because I haven’t had a lot of progress (in terms of development) with my game and I feel really bad about it. However, I have been discussing with my client about it: how can we make it less complicated? We came with a small scope for it, but it’s still complicated for me to develop regarding the skills that I have so far. I have gotten some feedback for my project outside the Studio class and the recommendation that I have received was to read the following article :

Brown, S. J., Lieberman, D. A., Gemeny, B. A., Fan, Y. C., Wilson, D. M., & Pasta, D. J. (1997). Educational video game for juvenile diabetes: Results of a controlled trial. Medical Informatics, 22(1),77-89.

I couldn’t find the original source, so I just read the abstract of the article so far :(!

Also, I have been studying ActionScript in order to program my game and this was one thing that I discussed with a classmate about it. The problem with most gamming tutorials and open source that are available on the Internet do not provide the result that I am expecting for my game. Those websites offer explanations on how to build a race or fight game. It’s been hard to find good sources that offer what planning to develop for this game.

One of the books that I have been using to learn ActionScript is “Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8” by Kristian Besley, Sham Bhangal, Eric Dolecki, David Powers. It’s been very helpful for me to go through the book, especially because it provides the reader with a lot of analogy. Sometimes, the analogy seems silly; however, for someone like me that have always struggled with ActionScript, it makes easy to comprehend what you are doing.

Right now, I’m trying to understand how variables work with Movie Clips since this is the main thing that I need on my game project. I’m going through the examples and the explanations provided on the book as well as going on the Internet to look for tutorials and open sources. I think for my game what I’ll need to do is assign values to each food on the shelf (which will be a Movie Clip) and once the user clicks on it, the value will be stored. Then, for that, I think I might need to create some sort of array (which I’m not very familiar with). After the user has finished adding all the food to the bowl, the values should be computed. Basically, this is the part that I’m struggling right now. I’m not sure exactly how should I do this.

My plan for this week is to keep working on my project and trying to figure the ActionScript code.