Presenting and Publishing My Game

   The Big Idea: Provide an update on your team's game topic. What is the most important concept you want your players to learn? The most important concept in my game is sports injuries. I have eight different sports injuries in my game and when it tells you that you just suffered one, you have the option to learn more about it.

   Making Decisions as a Team: How did your team's ideas about the game topic change over time? Originally, I thought I would have four different teams in my game but then it was reduced to two and now there’s only one. I also had four options on my title screen but now I only have three.

   Roles & Responsibilities: Tell us more about your team process. Please each talk about your specific roles, and how you work together. I am the only person on my team so I have all of the roles a multi-person team would share equally. It has been stressful at times but I’ve managed pretty well.

   Research: What kind of research went into your game topic? What did you learn about your topic? What message do you want the player to understand? I learned the specifics of sports injuries and not just what they are called and where they are at. It actually talks about how they might happen and what happens.

   The User Experience: Explain the actions players take in your game. How do you play it? What decisions were made about features to include, and how did you decide? You will be showed a problem and you will have a certain amount of time to figure it out and then run to the correct answer on the football field. The requirements for our game this year was that it had to have a math concept, a social issue, and your math had to somehow be incorporated in to your social issue. My social issue is sports injuries and my math concept is the order of operations so I’ll have an order of operations problem on the screen and you’ll have to run to the correct answer. If you get tackled you suffered a sports injury.

   Mastering Flash: What Flash resources have been most helpful in your learning so far, and why? How did you locate these resources? The ability to check your progress by clicking on the “Test Movie” button or by pressing Ctrl+Enter. It makes me able to view my progress while I am making a scene and catches any errors I might have in my actions layer.

   Overcoming Challenges: What curriculum topic has been most difficult for you so far? How did you overcome this difficulty? What programming features are you most proud of in your game? Most of the curriculum topics were tough but I dealt with it by coming in for lunch and working on them then. I got all As in this class this year and I’m very proud of myself for it, because it was the most difficult class I have ever taken in my entire life. The programming feature that I am the most proud of in my game is my collision detection with the keyboard.

Final Game

Well, Globaloria is wrapping up. It has been a very fun and interesting class. It has been hard at times for me and the rest of the class but we kept pushing and pushing harder until we finally got finished. I feel a lot better now that most of the stress from this class is gone. It has come in boatloads. I'm really happy now.

Almost There

It is almost time to present our final games in Globaloria. We have to enter them Friday. I will be staying after school Tuesday and Thursday to brush up on things and get finished. I think I will be able to get done. I was must informed about an hour ago that next year our main educational focus will be WV Studies, not math. I hope I will be able to be in this class next year because I have a couple good ideas for a WV Studies concept. It's just a matter of finding a social issue. It should be fun.

My Globaloria Buddies

Globaloria has been very tough this year and I couldn't have made it this far with out my fellow classmates. They have been a huge help. We support each other and push each other to do better. We rarely ever argue with each other and we work very well together. We all believe in each other to do a good job and we trust each other when we need help.

More Trouble...

Just when we thought that everything was going to be good from here on out... BANG! The server messes up. Yesterday, we were having trouble just getting logged on to the computer. We couldn't get on the Internet so I couldn't update my blog or fill out my learning log. Those are really the only things I have to deal with now on the Internet other than checking my Gmail every once in a while. The only thing I could work on yesterday when I finally found a computer that worked was work on Flash. The only problem was that our hard drives weren't working so I couldn't save it there. I saved it to my desktop though so hopefully it stayed. Anyways, apparently the server's working, at least in here, but they haven't announced it over the announcements yet so who knows? That's been the question all year in this class. Who knows?

Flash Upsetting Me

Sometimes Flash can be very upsetting. Whether it's codes or getting things to work. That kind of stuff. I am currently trying to get a score to carry over to another scene but I might have to give up after a little while and just work with what I have. Another upsetting part in Flash is buttons. They don't always go to the scenes you want them too and sometimes it Flashes. You also have to remember to give your buttons an instance name and the scene you want to go to a frame label. I am getting better at it though and I hope I don't have near as many troubles with Flash next year as I am this year.

Dealing With Distractions

There can be distractions in Globaloria that can be hard to deal with. All you can really do is sit by yourself which is really tough because we have free seating and I want to sit with my friends. I decided though that talking to my friends isn't as important as it is getting all your work done and getting a good grade in Globaloria. I still have the rest of the day to talk to them so I do fine.

The Stress of Getting Demos Finished in Time

Globaloria's starting to get more interesting every day. You never know what's going to happen next... Literally. Lately, we've been struggling to be consistent with what lab we are in. The Flash stopped working in our main lab so we've in hopping between two labs ever since for Globaloria. One of them are hooked up to a different server than the rest of the school so when we're in there, I don't have any of my files from my hard drive. To help me with that, I've borrowed one of my nice friend's flash drive. I just learned that you could upload stuff to the Wiki since that's usually always working and I can pull up that file in whatever lab we're in from the Wiki. It's been really helpful. So how does all of this relate to the demo? Well we have to get a demo done because we could be presenting them any time now and switching between labs and not having access to all of your files can really make it hard for you. I've managed though so I hope I am ready by the times we have to present.

Globaloria So Far

Overall, Globaloria has been my favorite academic class. It has been the most stressful though. I think the time it got the most stressful at was when we started to really get familiar with Flash after the mini game. When we had to get things to move with keyframes and getting button interaction. Right now though, it hasn't been too stressful. There are only 4 thing I've had to keep up with lately, learning log, blogging, game pitch, and getting the demo finished. The learning log isn't too hard to keep up with, I've already finished game pitch, I'm working on the demo right now which hasn't been that hard, and then there's blogging which I find very hard to keep with. I'm glad it's not an every day thing though.

Adding Keyboard Input

Learning how to make things move using the keyboard on Flash wasn't that hard. On the wiki page they had all of the codes so I just copied and pasted it to actionscript and it moved. I decided to make a scene in my game similar to the mini game. It's called fumble. It is where there is an offender and a defender and you are supposed to recover the loose ball (fumble) before the defender catches you. There are no limits on where you can go but you don't want to go too far off the screen because you will not know your way back to where you can recover the ball for points. If you do get too far away and you don't know your way back, you have no other choice but to let the defender tackle you and give up one point. It will put you back onto the main stage immediately and you can pick up many points that way. Just make sure that when he comes back to avoid him. If he catches you in the spot it resets you to, it's game over. You have to refresh the page or you can press the main menu button at the bottom. You can press the main button menu at any time you want. I will make lots of changes to it including adding acutal football players to the screen that are colored into the two teams colors. I think the background will be black instead of the blue background I will be using on most of my pages. Anyways, here's the incomplete scene that still makes a pretty fun game.

Preparing For Demos

This is a very stressful time for almost everybody in the Globaloria class. Preparing demos is, in my opinion, where everything starts for us. I was just informed that our demos have to ready by March 20, 21, or 22 depending on when you are drawn to go. Making a demo isn't the only thing that goes with the demo. You also have to buy nice clothes for the presentation. I have some nice clothes at home though and I have a tie. Really, the only thing I have to worry about now is getting the demo finished, keeping up with the learning log, and blogging weekly.

Adding scenes

There are many movies i can use for this but i chose the one with the most action going on. As you can see there is a football moving across the screen and there is another football. The one that isn't moving you can drag. There are also many buttons. Not all of them are working but there's a larger majority of the ones that are working than the ones that aren't.

Adding Sounds

Adding sounds is definatly one of my favorite parts of Globaloria. It is very fun. It is also complicated like every part of Flash. I'm starting to figure it out though which is good. The Flash movie below has 4 differents scenes in it. The sound comes in at the order of operations help page. You click on the help button on the main menu and you click on how to do the order of operations. You see the instructions on the screen and the sound is me reading them out.

Adding Animations

Adding animations was the easier of the two. I knew how to do that a couple months ago and it is my favorite part of Flash. If you have extra time in Globaloria class (which we rarely get) I mess around with keyrframes. I spell my name out by adding one letter per frame. It's really fun. Drag and drop wasn't that hard but it was harder than the adding animations. My good buddy, Collin, who was sitting next to me at the time helped me. Here are is the link. The football ball with the smaller white lines representing laces on them is the football that you drag and as you can tell, the one with the thicker ones is the football with action.

Adding Mouse Input

I have seen many assignments in Globaloria that looked hard at first but when I got into it, it wasn't hard by any stretch of the imagination. I haven't used many of the instructional videos because I didn't think they did a very good job. I used other sources like my friends. The instructional video for animation was pretty good though. Drag and drop didn't have a video but pictures and codes that you could copy and paste to the actions layer to your scene. My friend Collin did a pretty good drag and drop. I don't know what the cup's for but it caught my eye. Without further ado, here it is.

Staying Caught Up

Is it me or is it really hard to stay caught up in Globaloria? I think it's pretty hard. I manage though. It takes lots of hard work and time though. One thing is that I have to go to lunch ZAP (Zeroes aren't permitted). I'm not going there because I have zeroes. I'm going there to prevent zeroes. It works pretty well too. I also seperate myself from the rest of the class. By doint that, I don't goof off or anything. The nearest person to me is two seats away.

Working With Buttons

Trying to get buttons to work wasn't that fun for me. It didn't take me that long to do though. It just seemed like a while because of how much I anticipated it. Now, adding buttons to scenes is easy and fun. I still have questions though. I noticed that when you copied and pasted a code from the Wiki Tips place on myglife.org, it only showed two codes but I think that I can get it to work. I've had doubts about many things in Globaloria this year. How am I going to do this? How am I going to do that? In the end though everytime, it worked for me. I definitley had doubts about adding buttons but I got into business (I couldn't think of anything else to say).

My Christmas Break

We have many Christmas traditions at our house. One is on Christmas Eve we always eat dinner at the Chinese restaurant in Lewisburg. We also travel the day after Christmas or someone comes to our house so we're always with family during the holidays. Christmas for us doesn't have as many traditions as Thanksgiving does but they are still great traditions. We also always go to the 5:45 Christmas Eve mass at our church. The only year we didn't go was I think 5 years ago when we showed up at the wrong Catholic church since there is 3 in Greenbrier County. We also spend time with family and friends on New Years. We usually go to a suburb of Richmond, VA called Glen Allen. There are some unfortunate traditions that happen that we don't want to. Every year, someone in my family gets sick. One year, everyone but my dad got sick. That's 4 out of 5 people. This year I was the only one to catch it though. I wish it were someone else though.