Shifting From Moddying in Europa Universalis 4 to Victoria 2

Victoria 2 Shift

Today I decided after reflecting heavily over the vacation to change the game that I was modding from Europa Universals 4 to Victoria 2 since to me it just made more sense. Due to the scenario that Orwell's 1984 was based on a dystopian future were technology won't develop any further and all nations in the world will fight. I realized that all of the things I wanted to use in EU4, was better in Victoria 2 and so I decided to switch games. So I started to work on creating the nations in 1984 into the game of Victoria 2. I managed to add the basic things that are required for any country, however, for some reason the game just kept on crashing for no reason, which for me is really annoying. I am looking into it and am hoping to continue on working on the mod and if it doesn't work on by the next two lessons I'm probably going to switch back to Europa Universals.

The next class for me was rather uneventful due to a minor mistake on my part. The night before I had deleted Victoria 2 to see if when I reinstalled it all of the problems I had would disappear. The only bad part to this plan is that I forgot to download and reinstall the game. Since I didn't do that, I instead decided to refine my presentation that I had created the day before and to work on a the blog reflection sheet. Today wasn't the funnest day, but the work I did was necessary and worth the time that I spent. This concludes my week which doesn't really have a lot to show for simply due to technical problems and

My Blog Reflection (Sorry for Ugly Display but I Don't Know how to Fix)

Blog Reflection Rubric
	Exceeds Standard	Meets Standard	Approaching Standard	Below Standard	My reasoning
Writing	5 Thoughts are well organized and presented with no ambiguity. The writing is focused throughout the reflective piece. Style of writing is rich.	4 Thoughts are organized and logically presented. Some portions of the material are more developed and focused than others. Style of writing is apparent.	3 The material presented is scattered with gaps and needs transitions. Style of writing is generic.	1 Thoughts are presented in very general or incomplete terms. Style of writing is not discernable. There are obvious gaps and needs for additional information.	I tried to organize my thoughts as best and as clear as I could. Sometimes though I was not able to do this unfortunately and I thought that some of my blogs were weaker than others. I feel however, that I do have a style and I actually try my best to change it up sometimes.
Self-Awareness/Process	5 Clearly identifies and illustrates strengths, weaknesses, confusions, and areas of inquiry by specifically stating areas and reasons for their occurrence.	4 Identifies strengths, weaknesses, confusions, and areas of inquiry by stating areas in which they occur, although does not explain reasons why they occur.	3 Identifies general strengths, weaknesses, and confusions but does not explain or illustrate these.	1 Reflection addresses strengths, weaknesses, or confusions in vague or incomplete terms.	I am a very conscientious person and am not afraid to point out my own mistakes and my successes. When  I have a problem, I point it out and try my best to rectify it. I'm not afraid to show the reader of my blog where I screwed up and made a mistake. I feel that I am very honest and clear in pointing out my problems and successes while explaining what my problems are.
Risk-Taking	5 Honestly communicates successes and failures with concrete examples. Clearly demonstrates a willingness to change and learn.	4 Communicates successes and failures openly but in general terms. willingness to change and learn.	3 Refers to successes and/or failures in broad and unsubstantiated terms. Willingness to change or learn cannot be determined from information presented.	1 References to successes, failures, thoughts, feelings, or processes regarding work, self, or students are missing or too ambiguous to be understood. Reflection does not include information that suggests a willingness on the part of the writer to learn or change in any way.	I feel that throughout the course I have been very honest in my communication with my successes and failures. Also, when I have been criticized I have changed and if you take a look at my blog, I am sure that you would notice a great change and improvement.
Goal-Directedness	5 Suggestions for self-improvement are clearly linked to a review of the strengths and weaknesses of current work.	4 Suggestions for self-improvement are generally related to perceived strengths and weaknesses.	3 Suggestions for self-improvement and proposed goals are too general or too tentative.	1 The relationship between perceived goals and current practice cannot be established either because the analysis is too superficial or has not been completely carried out. Goals are not stated in attainable terms.	While I am able to take criticism and work off of it to improve and get better, I don't always do it as well as I would hope and sometimes I am stubborn on what I am doing and don't change. However, almost all of my suggestions have been based on self improvement and are almost all about my strengths and weaknesses.

Building Up Aerial Defense and Moving On

Building Up Aerial Defense

Today was a productive day for me since I was able to all of the planes movement images and was able to create 2 new enemy actors. I spent most of the day doing some boring image rotations to make sure that the airplane is moving correctly and doesn't look janky. For me I found that this took way longer than I expected and was very glad when I finally got everything done. Fortunately for me, even though I couldn't remember at first what code I was using to set the plane, after a quick look back I found it easily. For me I was very happy that I was able to search and find useful code so quickly since before I had been unable to do so and had actually failed the previous two times that I had tried. After this I played around a bit with the movements and found myself unsatisfied with the result of them. Unfortunately, I was pressed for time and decided that it was important to create 2 more enemies before I focused again on the plane image. To be quite frank I was getting tired of the plane image and needed to move on from that image. So I found 2 images that I liked and created 2 new enemies from them. Unfortunately for me, I didn't realize that they were too big before it was too late and so they were kinda useless. This was around the time class ended and so I was forced to leave. But for me on the bright side I knew what I needed to focus on and what needed to be changed so that I could improve the game.

How the Game looks like with the two over sized enemies

This is the how all of the planes look,

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How I finished and left the game 

Today when I started I decided that I would try to get rid of the clunky movement in the game. The game works fine, but when I'm moving my plane in a diagonal way it doesn't really work and instead it shows the plane going up or right. This annoyed the hell out of me and I really wanted to change it, I created a new image which moves up to the right, however the code I added didn't work and I decided to check if it was possible to do it. Unfortunately for me it apparently didn't exist, which really sucks. After figuring out that it didn't work, I decided to fix my other problem of resizing the enemies in the game. This was an easy task for me since I already knew what I was doing and it really wasn't that hard, the only bad thing was how I had to do it from scratch since the files didn't properly save so I had the start from the original big image and worked from there. After this I just decided that I had had enough with codying and talked to Mr. Shappell to change to modding Europa Universals 4. So to do that I started on a new project proposal. until class ended.

How the Plane on an angle looks like

The Day of Solace

The Day of Solace

The final build of Earth Survivor 

Today I worked on changing up the fireballs to make them act a bit different and to make the game more interesting. Unfortunately, once I finished up all of the code and made the fireballs spin around in a ball, I realized that there really was no point for them to be there. The game works perfectly well without them and the difficulty is pretty high without adding more challenges. Perhaps if there were levels in greenfoot I would change it up. But unfortunately there is no level changing in Greenfoot and so I decided to not add the code/ spinning fireball. Then I decided since I was done with the game I was going to go look up level making and if you could add a timer into the game. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything about adding a timer into the game besides one minor forum post that discussed that it was probable that it could happen but didn't actually show how. Another thing that I found out is that you can add a high score, which is great but doesn't really help me since it doesn't apply to the game that I am currently working at. That was around the time class ended, even though it doesn't seem like I did a lot, I was very happy with all the work that I have done for my game and am glad that it is finally done.

How the spinning fireball looked like

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The Third Game 

I started to make a new game where the actors could start to move around spinning. However, I realized a bit too late that the game wasn't really fun and quite frankly made me want to throw up. The game was originally planned to work by you moving around the rotating red triangle. I got the code to moving around spinning which was great but then I started to really think about what I was going to do with this game. In the end after reflecting on what I had made, I thought of all the work I would have to do and what I hoped the end result would be. After this I realized that the means was not worth the end. I realized that I would be spending a lot of time to make a game that I would not be very proud of it and really was not worth my time or patience. So I decided to drop this game and move on to something that I wanted to do. My only regret is that I had spent way too much on this game and this pushed me to drop the game.   

The code which made the triangles spin around

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Game Number Four

How the new game works

This new game that I started working on for me is a lot better in my opinion since I actually enjoy what I am doing and enjoy the look of the game. Unfortunately, I had spent too much time working on the last game and so I have gotten only a little bit done. I unfortunately managed to only get the plane image in and the code to make the plane move around. Even though I had done very little, I am very glad with what I have done and can't wait to improve my game even more.

Polishing Earth Survival Game

Polishing Earth Survival Game

How the game looks now 

Today I felt like polishing up my game so that I could move on and perhaps make a new game. I started out with 2 major things that I knew I needed to finish up. The first thing I had to do was make the asteroids remove the planet from the game. This was easy since I already knew what code I was going to use and so I just copy and pasted it and after some modifications, it worked. Then I decided to put in the ending into the game. This took a bit longer than making the code remover work since I was now working on two different classes and I wanted to make sure that everything worked. This fear and caution towards making the end game state was mainly due to my last game where it didn't work as I planned. Fortunately, this time it worked wonderfully and there were no problems what so ever. This was great for me since I was really worried that I would have to spend half of the class working on it like last time. Then towards the end since there wasn't a lot of class time left I started to work looking up if it was possible to create a timer in Greenfoot. From my research it seemed that theoretically it was possible but no one seemed to have been able to yet. This made me sort of disappointed since I wanted to create a way to create a high score in the game.

The You Lose Screen

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-Moving the characters around to make the game hard + changing the speed to make the game fair
-How I plan to make the rock actors all move around differently.

Unfortunately, for me I was not able to get a lot of work done this Wednesday due to several computer problems. At first Greenfoot refused to start for a good 20 minutes. I shrugged this off since I wanted to get started and so I could finish up the game. Since most of the game was finished up I decided to start by making some unique asteroids. So I created a new subclass which spun around the bottum of the game. This was since I had discovered that if you stayed still at the bottom you wouldn't be hit by anything.

So after creating the spinning asteroids I started to play around with where the asteroids started (Look at the top picture to see it how it turned out). I was really happy with how everything worked out and how the game was actually kinda challenging. However, when this was done I realized that the internet wasn't working anymore. It was 2:30 and so I decided to go check it out. Unfortunately, for me it took a while to fix and by the end when everything was fixed, it had taken over a hour to get fixed.

Finishing Things

Finishing Up My Game

Today I managed to finish up my game which unfortunately took a while longer than I hoped or expected. Fortunately it was only a minor hiccup and I was glad that it wasn't anything major. Today however, I feel like shaking up my blog posts a little bit by letting the pictures do the talking and explanation. I think that this is a good idea since it should make things easier to explain and also should hopefully show off what I have managed to achieve over these past sessions. 

This is how the game starts out at. All of the characters are in place with the main goal of the game being that you as a cross must destroy the ghosts before they eat most of the sheep. While the ghosts which are ai controlled just move around eating the sheep.

At first I had no problem programming in the "YouWin" (which you can see towards the bottom SW of the screen) which appears when the player has successfully gobbled up all 4 of the ghosts. Now while this code worked, the main problem arose when the time came to program in the "YouLose". For some reason the game didn't like it when you make the game end on another character other than the main one.

As you can see in the next 2 pictures, even though all of the sheep had been removed from the game, the game over screen didn't want to appear unfortunately.

For a while I couldn't figure it out but after tinkering a bit with the number of sheep required to get eaten I got a number(#16) which seemed to work. Fortunately, for me Mr. Shappell suggested that I change the code from an (=) sign to a more than sign (>). While this helped it didn't really work all that well. This is when I started to think that perhaps because there were 4 ghosts running around the game that it maybe screwed up with how the counting was working. This was a dilemma for me since I wanted the game to be a bit hard and that you couldn't win just by standing still. I played around with the numbers and I ended up with the perfect number which was 16. While it may not always end up actually working and presenting the "YouLose" screen, it presents it at 95% of the time and that works for me.

This is how the game ends after getting everything to work correctly. If the ghosts eat to many sheep its game over for the player.

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I started off in the next class feeling a bit down since even though I didn't mention it on the previous post I had decided to try out a new way of making Greenfoot's background. Unfortunately rotating and turning didn't actually work . With that failure in mind I managed through several ideas. At first I started trying to set a unique background but after a while I spotted the space background in Greenfoot. Seeing this, I decided to make a survival game that where objects were flying around in space. Once I realized this I spent most of the rest of the class setting up the actors in the game and made the actors moved. I enjoyed making this game and it went a lot faster than my previous game which shows to me how much more experienced I had gained in Greenfoot.

This is how my game looks like currently.

My two main actors

This is the main character of the game

This is the Meteor actor which is the enemy object you have to avoid. 

Finally Getting Things Done

          Making the Game Work

        Originally I first started adding classes and sub classes to the game and making sure that everything worked. Fortunately for me unlike last time I was able to finish up everything and have it run the moment I need it to run. Once I was done with the classes I put in the movement code for all of the actors. This code worked great and I had no major issues with the movement code besides one little issue where one of the actors when it hit the border of the map, would get stuck. Fortunately this wasn't that big of a deal and didn't happen again. Around this time I also realized that the pictures of the actors were a bit too big for what I was building and spent a bit of time to reduce and make them smaller since I thought that it was necessary if I wanted to make the game playable. In the end I was quite happy with the result but realized that I still had a long way to go before I was done.

The Game Currently

Today since it was a short lesson I decided to finish up as much as the game as I possibly could. The first thing I did was to add another ghost into the game since this would make the game be more balanced and harder for the main character. At first I was going to make it so that the cross would lose if it hit the ghosts but then after some thinking realized that the game would be a lot more funner if instead of doing all of that, I would just make the ghosts attack the ship (liked planned originally) and make the cross kill the devils. Now the goal of the game is to remove all of the ghosts to before they remove all of the goats. Before class had finished I had been able to change the code around to make the game work. Fortunately for me nothing went wrong and I managed to change the game completely and get the YouWin image to show up once you win as the cross. I really

 enjoyed the past 2 classes since I got a lot of work done and managed to nearly complete my game.

Here is how the game starts off with you being at the center and the game and the ghosts on all 4 sides. The game is relatively easy but on occasion you will lose.

Unfortunately I have yet to add an end game for when the ghosts eat all of the sheep. But considering all of the work and things that I have accomplished I was very happy with what I have done.

This is what the game looks like when you destroy all of the ghosts in the game. Really glad how easy it was to finish up this game and get things done.