Action script is still rather new to me; I made this game as part of an assignment. I was quite pleased of the name 'Crap Attack'. In the learning process before going off and creating our own games we made a handful of other simple items such as calculators for scoring and custom cursors to make the mouse look less generic.
One of the games I used as a template so to speak was this space game, you’re a rocket ship and then your simply shot at the enemies, there was no scoring system or any real end, the two enemies just kept coming back until you said enough.
Space game
The game principle is fairly similar to my final product except you don’t get shot at you’re the only one shooting, the enemies however move and the idea is to hit as many as you can inside the time limit. The criteria for the game was rather simple but making everything work or coming up with a way to include certain aspects was hard for some people, but fortunately for me things just seemed to fall into place. The seven things the game needed to have was Scenes, Controlling frames with script, In/out operations, Calculations, Variables, Clip + File and Keyboard and/or mouse input (interactivity).
Scenes were easy to cover; the intro or title screen alone sent you to 4 different screens, how to play and then 3 different difficulties. Controlling frames with script went hand in hand with scenes, the script is how you navigate between frames and scenes, another example of controlling frames is when the people get hit they have a moment where there is bird poo on their heads.
In/out operations this is covered on the title page too, there is a ‘combo box’ or a drop down menu that allows you to select a difficulty, depending on which you choose the colour of the bird changes. Multiple difficulties also contribute to Calculations, in hard hits count for more than when in easy, although the characters move vaster and the “shots” you fire move slower.
Calculations and Variables really go hand in hand, for my game at least, this was originally an accident but when you hit a target the poo disappears but the object technically keeps going, suffice to say that they poo becomes invisible and while its intersecting the person your points go up so instead of just getting 3 points for a hit, if the poo is in front of the person and they walk into it you get more points for a better hit. This is also Clip + File, though the choice of words aren’t quite right, clip and file having two things intersect and trigger something. In this case when the poo hits the people below, it triggers an animation where there is poo on their head in addition to adding to the score.
Keyboard or mouse input interactivity, you play as the bird and the bird is effectively your cursor, a graphic follows where the mouse is and the cursor itself is hidden. In addition to all of this the timer is controlled by a short movie clip that at the end of its cycle deducts 1 from the timer, the cycle is a full second, and is a very basic timer. There was no real criteria for graphics so a background was never considered though it would have improved the over all look of the game.
Crap Attack - The final product
I made this game as an assessment for Multimedia Certificate 3, final mark 25/25.
