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.