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.

Scrolling Background

Today marks the day we begin our own assignments as groups in the action script tutorials. The first tutorial for our team, Klangfarbenmelodie, is called "Scrolling Backgrounds."

Very simple instructions, it's basically a tutorial reminding the reader of the importance of differentiating layers. I'm fairly certain ambiguity in the layering is what causes most problems in creating scrolling backdrops because, while the code is not easily memorized, there are a plethora of resources online to find the proper code. The zip file contains a finished product, which makes review much easier. A finished product should always be included in a Flash tutorial, I believe.

Learning From Others

Today our topic is "Learning From Others," obviously. It's not what I expected at all. I thought it would be a review or critique day; I usually like those days. Alas, it is more a topic on how to copy code from a specific source, which, I'll admit, is infinitely useful in a more cryptic way.

The main tutorial was on the actual wiki. This makes things a good bit easier. The assignment seemed more mental than proving one is able to execute the process, as it is such a simple process, proof is probably not needed. I would think the "moral" of this subject pertains more to being able to view other's works to see exactly how they did a particular action, not being able to copy something verbatim.

I found no tutorials that would really help with what I'm doing in my game at this very moment, as the links given seemed too general. (The word "flash" typed into a browser doesn't seem as helpful as I'd like it to be.)

Programming

Today's topic is programming, so we watched a short video on the subject.

The video seemed helpful, instilling the fundamentals of our action panel. It made sure to stress the importance of our global function books, which I had been overlooking for so long. I'd have to locate very specific tutorials to find, well, almost any sort of code I needed. I now realize that this additional work is nearly always pointless, as the books contain most, if not all, of the code I could ever need.

Also, as a class, we were asked to find one tutorial that will help us exponentially in our game. The biggest issue we have in our game is adding collision detection to one of Heath's scenes, so the collision detection tutorial will probably be the most helpful at this point.

The site with the collision detection tutorial:
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/actionscript/hittest.htm