Meeting 27
What our final week will look like:
- Today, July 29 — have mostly-finished work (or as much as we can) on our websites by the end of our meeting
- Wednesday, July 30 — continue to work and finish projects; club meetings
- Thursday, July 31 — Summer term evaluations;
publish truly finished work, and our own in-house showcase - Friday, Aug. 1 — play games, and bask in our own glory!
What to do if you're done with everything?
Some possibilities, if you have finished work for your team
- Graphic displays for the Showcase: maybe collect game art examples and arranged them for 11"x17" printouts
- 3D modeling experimentation (see below for software links), or a contest with other designers that have time
- Add more features to old or new games:
- Transform game graphics into animations
- Start screen, with separate sdtk
- Game sound fx
- HUD layer (score, health, progress)
ASM showcase today!
4–6pm
You are all invited to attend, but family & friends will need a ticket.
If you need extra tickets, I might have more.
Otherwise, ask the teen interns downstairs.
Ambassadors
You will need to wear your ASM tshirts.
Rusty Swain will be the instructor present.
3d Modeling
Tools you can pick from:
Examples of 3D modeling from a previous summer
HUD
aka: heads-up display, aka status bar
- Create a new layer (on top) and set its parallax property to 0% x 0%
- Make sure ALL sprites and textboxes that are specific to the HUD are placed INSIDE of the viewport (not just the layout boundaries)
- Give textboxes a descriptive name (for sanity's sake), but if the text content will change depending on events in the game, then you don't need to write anything in the textbox (you'll let the code do it instead)
- Do make sure that textboxes have a font size and color that will make sense
Note that the text that remains the same all of the time is kept in quotations, and then a variable name is added after it.
Fun fact!
In your code, you can just refer to Global variables by name. But for instance variables you have to use this format:
objectName.instanceVariableName
For example:
player.health
Instance variables vs Global variables?
Instance variables are set at the start (or restart) of the layout.
They are also unique to sprites — such as: enemies each having their own health.
Global variables are carried from layout to layout. This is handy for player health, or for game progress.