How Does it all Relate?

Another prompt, how does this class... rather, the work we're doing in this class, relate to my career goals? The work relates to all of my interests, but in rather vague ways. For example, I like art. I was able to draw scenes for the game. (Rather poorly, may I add. I'm not a fan of the computer mouse as an artist's utensil.) My work in classical mediums is much better, in my opinion. Also, I like literature. Of course, I haven't done any sort of literary work in this class, but I have had to write particular thoughts and such down; I suppose that helps.

Really, this boils down to me not being completely sure what I want to do. I'd like to find a way to be able to write or create art in a career; just because I'm not very good at either doesn't mean I haven't been born to do it! Look at Andy Warhol and his complete lack of any technical talent or that Twilight-writin' lady. Also, every modern career seems so limiting. Classical interests are dead for the most part. There's no room for experimentation, it's all efficiency for the well-being of your fellow man. I sometimes wonder if my fellow man is really doing so well. I wonder if he yearns for a more classical lifestyle or if he's content knowing he is doing productive work and living a prosperous life.

Exceptional Inventions

Being inquired on the three most important inventions, I can't help but refer to my interest in fundamental things. Rather than expected things; the Internet, the automobile or something pertaining to modern medicine, more fundamental items that have allowed these to be invented seem more important to me. For example, the printing press, precursor to the Internet, would be my third on my list of important technology.

Oh! how many papers I've done on the printing press throughout primary school, as I'm sure others have. We take the importance of this gadget for granted and view the research of it as a chore. Well, it may be a chore. However, it has in every way increased the flow of information and allowed an industry of information to develop in a way attainable to the common man. An educated common man is quite important, yes? On to the item that would appear second on my list, though.

Once again, fundamentals! Clothes, am I right? Those are pretty important, keepin' people warm and all. I wear clothes all the time and have acquired an entire wardrobe of them over the years, making them substantially more attainable and, in turn, more common man-friendly than the printing press or its products. I especially like the inventions of the pleated trouser and t-shirt, despite my love of fundamentals suggesting I may enjoy the loin cloth or some even cruder dress. Anyway, on to my choice of the most important invention of man.

The proper treatment and preparation of food, pertaining mostly to meat. Pretty fundamental and important, huh? It's inarguable that this increases the life expectancy of humans exponentially. Honestly, what could be more important than living longer without being poisoned every time you consume a carnivore's feast? True enough, many of our relatively less fundamental inventors were vegetarians and whatnot (I'm talkin' about you, Da Vinci!), but I'd assume most weren't. In short, death prevents progress.

To conclude this, I'd like to offer a glimpse of a world without these inventions/invented processes: we'd be naked, utterly uneducated people and (probably) dead. That doesn't sound like a pleasant world. The modern medicine and health or diet reminders of the day may increase life expectancy by a few years; the Internet may allow information to travel more frequently and efficiently, and clothes... well, clothes are still clothes... Never the less, the point at hand is fundamentals are more important than anything modern man is doing. Rather, modern man's efforts are mere elaboration on his ancestors' original ideas, making original ideas more important, in my opinion.

What Makes Our Game Difficult?

What makes Klangfarbenmelodie's game difficult?

I don't think our game is difficult in any sense, but it is still based around what I would assume to be an approved STEM concept. The questions are fairly straight-forward, in no sense esoteric. The first mini-game may require a bit of time to experiment, but I'm sure any student could pass it. The fun is in the second mini-game. And, well, there's fun in the third mini-game too. I don't think the aim of our game is to be difficult, but to be informative or reinforcing of knowledge that has already been acquired.

Sound Effects

This weeks topic is adding sound effects. I opted out of being the person doing the main tutorial, as Heath and I have predominately been doing the tutorials and uploading the assets to the team page. It just seems the best way to finish our last topic would be having a teammate who hasn't gotten a chance to go through an individual tutorial, do just that.

Regardless, I've looked through the tutorial and found it rather reminiscent of our first "Adding Sound" activity; only sound effects are more scripting, less work with frames. As would be expected, since the instructions are intended for a button sound effect. I honestly didn't get into the more advanced sound effect coding. I don't suppose we'll need streaming sound or "abstract playback mechanisms", which just sounds like controlled looping exceptions to me. (I like how the title of the tutorial is "'Cool and Practical Sound Effects" when most of it seems to be elaborations on exceptions.)

Platforms

The topic for the week is "Platforms." Once again, I've volunteered to do the tutorial. It was quite informative, but was ultimately in vain, for Heath found a way to code our walls from the collision detection tutorial.

Anyway, the platform tutorial was probably the most complex tutorial, as the author basically had to build an entire game around it to demonstrate that the platforms were working as intended. Aside from the game around it, the actual walls were quite simple, maybe, twelve lines of code. That's all the process really consisted of; a simple solution for a potentially game-altering problem.

Also, the final product:

Collision Detection

The current topic for the week is collision detection.

This is an extremely simple process with the help of the tutorial. I only regret not being able to alter variables to an acceptable degree, but there aren't concrete variables to change. I expected to have lines and lines of code for every character on a particular frame, but it only takes ten or so lines of code on a single moving (movie clip) character.

The tutorial also broke the code down into separate functions, which is pretty nifty. Instead of copying and pasting, this tutorial allows the reader to fully understand the code he or she is using from the simplest function involved, to the exponentially more complex combined product.

http://www.kirupa.com/developer/actionscript/hittest.htm


Also, the finished product:

Scoring

The topic we've started today is "Scoring." It's going to take awhile for the team to fully apply this topic, as we need to put scoring in throughout our entire game at the moment, but I have gone through a few tutorials and feel I know enough to be able to finish a blog on the subject.

This is probably the easier function I've looked into on the individual assignments, as perfecting layering is not as crucial as it is with scrolling. For our game, we'll be using scores on buttons, which is probably the easiest form of scoring. It requires only a text field with variables set at "total" and a few lines of additional code on each button. The true test of scoring will be the tedium of adding three or so lines of code to every answer button and a variable text field to every scene in our game.