Character Effects

We have learned about character effects using action script. You can make your character do all kinds of neat stuff with a little code. Although it isn't necessary, this can add a nice touch to your game.

Testing and debugging

This is probably the most important topic we've covered. When you finish your game, you want to make sure that it works correctly or you're going to have a lot of angry players. This is also a great way to beef up coding skills.

Coding Enemies

If you have enemies in your game, you may want them to behave a certain way or to do certain things to you if you get too close. Very important if there are "enemies" in your game.

Platforms

So if you're running and jumping or what have you, platforms can be important. That is unless you want your character to just fall through everything.

Running and Jumping

Running and jumping is a great thing to know. Especially if you're making a side scrolling action game.

Drag and Drop

Drag and drop can be very important to your game if it has a, well you guessed it, drag and drop interface.

Timer

You may or may not want to put a timer in your game, depending on what kind of game it is. If it's a game that requires you to do something in a certain amount of time, hey, you might want to put a timer on it.

Sound Effects

Today we learned about sound effects. Games without sound would most likely be very boring so of course, this is very important.

Programming Practices

We have learned important programming practices in this class but one of the most important practices is neatness. It is an absolute nightmare when trying to debug sloppy code for the creator or somebody else.

Learning From Others

Learning from others is important and can be fun. some gamers may know something that you may not so if in doubt, feel free to ask someone and learn from their mistakes as well as your own.

Finding Solutions

Finding a solution to a problem is completely necessary, if you have problems of course. Nobody is perfect and no game is perfect but it is important to find solutions to any problem you may have. If you can't figure it out, ask somebody or look on the internet or in a book.

Score Keeping

Score keeping is almost always a very important part of the game. Unless there is no objective to the game, it most likely needs a way to keep score. Like sound effects, this is very easily accomplished with just a little bit of action script.

Sound effects

We have learned how to add sound effects to our games. Sound effects are vital unless you want to bore your audience to death and honestly, it's one of the easiest things to do.

Timers

Today we were shown how to implement timers in our games. Timers can be important to a game depending on what kind of game it is. We were shown how to do analog timers and digital so it gives us some variety to choose from if we implement one in our game.

Collision Detection

We have now learned about collision detection. This is key to almost any game made, not matter what it is. This is probably one of the most useful topics we've covered so far.

Scrolling Background

Scrolling backgrounds are essential to some games and easy to do. It let me play around with actionscript a little bit so I liked it.

Special Effects

Aside from moving along a path, we also learned how to do special effects. Very neat and also very fun.

Moving Along a Path

Today, one of the things learned was how to make animations move along a predetermined path. Relatively easy and lots of fun.

Actionscript

Today in Gaming II, we learned about actionscript. It reminds me a lot of visual basic mixed with PHP. Seems relatively easy since I have a background in programming.

Gaming Class

So I've started gaming II. I will be reading up on topics from gaming I and hopefully be starting my game soon.