Week 11 - Spring Break!

Yeah, spring break is here! Now I can hopefully "recharge my batteries" and get excited for the upcoming Gaming II presentations.

Week 10 - Platforms part 2 / Coding "Enemies"

This week is the tenth week of class at MCTC. Next week is Spring Break! It will be a well deserved week off! :-) On Monday, I showed my students how a simple movieclip below the stage of their Platforms file can create a "deadzone" for their characters. All of my students now enjoy their hero's falling off of their platforms in their games! They are slightly morbid that way. :-) Monday and Wednesday we also covered the Coding "Enemies" topic. When I go through this topic, I require my students to complete four separate flash projects. The first is based on the enemy following the mouse (as illustrated in Step 1 of the topic). The second is a slight derivative off the first, not allowing the "enemy" to follow the path of the mouse's current position till a mouse click occurs. This style creates more of a "waypoint" effect. And finally, the third and fourth are based on the two videos on Step 3 of the topic. These videos really bring back that statement my high school math teacher once said, "You will need and use geometry and trig one day!" My students definitely used Trig for the Coding "Enemies" topics. It was even fun to switch the code around to make the enemy run away from your character as opposed to chase it. Remember, some old horse caught another horse taking oats away! Sin = o/h; cos = a/h; Tan = o/a. Not bad for a guy who hasn't touched a math book for ten years. :-)

Week 9 - Running, Jumping, etc / Platforms

This week, my students worked on the Running, Jumping, etc. and Platforms topics. We completed the topics in this order because it made sense to learn how to jump on flat land before we learned to jump on multi-tiered land. Here is an interesting skill game made by one of my students.

When you press the spacebar the character jumps in the air. The colored bars give you points. The goal of the game is to keep hitting spacebar to maintain your character's altitude. If the character hits the ground, your score returns to zero. If the character's altitude goes above the flash stage, no points are earned. Good Luck!

Week 8 - Character Effects / Drag and Drop

This week we hit Week 8, half way through the spring semester. We are going to cover the Character Effects and Drag and Drop topics. When I cover Drag and Drop, I typically go over scripted tweening as well. I leave you with a fantastic Flash file from one of my students. Last fall, when John and Benji said they wanted to make a guitar hero style flash game to teach guitar to students, I was skeptical it could be pulled off. This semester, John continues the "good fight" since Benji graduated. He has recruited a fellow student, and John has just posted a demo that shows me that they might actually pull it off after all. Great start so far!


The strings of the guitar are pressed by using the number keys at the top of the keyboard (1-8).