I was really glad when this project was complete. At first I thought, wow - we get to create a game, that should
be a lot of fun, but then once I started I realized that this was going to take a lot of time and thinking to make
sure everything works properly. The general purpose of this assignment was to create a game which had at least one
random element in it that the user couldn't control; the rest was up to us.
I first had to think of an idea of what kind of game I wanted and I knew I didn't want to make it too difficult since
I was still getting used to Flash. I chose to create a game that would let friends compete against each other to see
who could get the lowest time. I thought that this would make the game more enjoyable rather than having a series of levels
to complete as most games have. That is how I came up with the game that lets users click on numbered buttons in order, in
different arrangements to see who could do it the fastest. Granted this wasn't an orignal idea, but then again neither were
most of my classmates as it is hard to come up with an original game.
The first part I had to get was the timer. I spent a good couple of hours playing around in Flash until I came up with a timer.
An example of my first timer is shown below. Once this was completed, I had to integrate this into the buttons.
An example of the timer I created for the game
For the buttons, I decided to make one level a static part where the buttons would always be in the same spots. In the
second level, I went with one large button that moved around randomly and you had to click on with your mouse. As the number
of hits increased, the button got smaller and smaller, making it harder to hit.
Well, now that I had my game working, I still wasn't satisfied as I wanted to add a special touch. I went with all the scores
being stored in a MySQL database that showed all the people who played it and what their time and number of hits/misses were for
each level. Constructing the database was easy, it was getting Flash talking to the database that was going to hold me back. Luckily,
I had previously bought a few Flash books so I started looking through them to see what functions submit a query string to a webpage. I
came upon the loadVariablesNum() function which did exactly what I wanted it to - submit information to a webpage through
a query string. Now my game was complete.
Everyone was impressed with my game, especially since
it had a way of storing all the scores - no one else had that functionality! A game that I though deserved a lot of recognition
was my friends who incorporated our teacher's head as an enemy you have to kill. His can be
found here.
