Entry 5 - Spelling out the game

Yesterday, I had a meeting with Josh about my project and I think the meeting went pretty well. Before we met, Josh had already requested me to spell out my ideas – “how does this game will work?” Therefore, I started writing down the process of the game and here is what I got:

Game: Prepare your meal

Theme: “Let’s eat Italian” (The reason to create a theme for the game is to limit our choices in terms of different meals a person can prepare)

How the game will work: The game will have 9 sections of food for the player to choose. They are: meat, bread, vegetables, fruit, dairy, condiments, beverages, sauce, and sweets/desserts. Most sections will have only three choices of food that the player can choose; others will have a little more (like the condiments section). The player can choose only one food per section. The value assigned for the food in each section should be as follow below:

• Light food – 1
• Average/regular – 2
• Heavy food – 3

Once the player clicked on the food that s/he wants to add to her/his dish, a new window will come up with the nutrition label of that food and the portion size. The player will select the portion size that s/he wants. The portion size and values assigned to them should be as follow below:

½ cup – 2

1 cup – 3

1 ½ cup – 4

After they have finished each section, they will click on a button, like “done” and then, the program will compute a formula like the following one:

A x B = C

If C> X they will receive negative feedback and the opportunity to “try again”.

If C they will receive positive feedback.

In my meeting with Josh, we discuss about the project and its feasibility. I showed him some of the sources that I have. We brainstormed a little bit more about the process of this game and we figure that what I would be developing is something similar with an online shopping cart. Thus, we looked on the Internet and we found a couple of sources. After looking through those resources, Josh said that I should try to have at least one section working by next week and that also, he mentioned that I should still keep working on “spelling out” my project to make it more clear and comprehensive if we need to ask information or help through online forums.

For next week, my plan is to work on the AS for my project. I’ll work with the “shopping cart” resources and try to have at least one section of my game working. I hope it works :-S!

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.