Week 9 (After Winter Break)

There were lots of problems that arose while I was coding during the winter break. The first was that I wasn’t able to put images into the game. I did some research and found that they had to be in the same directory, which is the folders in file manager before I could add them. After that an error showed they had to be .bmp files to work. That was pretty easy to find a website and convert them. The second was that it wouldn’t close if you clicked the “x” button. It had been working before but I went back through the tutorial and found there was a piece of code I must have deleted on accident while adding the other stuff. After that it just took a bit of experimenting to figure it out and make it work. There were a few tiny problems like typing the wrong letter/word but I caught them all pretty quickly. One that I think is useful to remember is when I was trying to make the character move. The “main loop” makes sure the game keeps running and most other stuff. The “draw window loop” adds all the color and characters. The spaceships weren’t moving even though I had done the movement the exact same as in the video. I figured out that they were moving but the draw window loop was only used at the very beginning so I never saw the characters move.

After those two problems within the first twenty minutes of the tutorial video, out of ninety minutes, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to complete the tutorial before the winter break was done but after one amazing day where I got through forty minutes of coding (one hour total) I was excited for the game to be finished and confident that I would be able to do it but the next day I ran into one more problem and it took me the longest to figure out yet. When I tried to add text it wouldn’t work and I wasn’t sure what the error meant. I tried changing the code in many different ways but I kept getting the same error. Finally, my dad helped me to figure out that it wasn’t a problem with the code but I had to download something in order to make it work. After that, just like everything else, it just took a bit of experimenting to figure it out.

My hopes for what the game was going to be like were very high and I have lowered them now that I have learned the basics of coding. I like to watch video’s of game developers and things called game jams, in which you have a short amount of time (eg. a week) to make the best game possible. After watching lots of those it seemed quite easy to code but they have had much more practice and are very good at coding. The other reason was that I had done lots of block-based coding in which there are premade sentences of code that you just have to arrange in certain ways. For example, in the block-based coding you just have to hit a button to turn gravity on/off but in python/pygame you have to type in a whole paragraph of code and make sections and connect it to everything else to make sure it works properly.

While doing the tutorial I was thinking about easier games to make and I probably won’t include semi-solid platforms, levers, or checkpoints but I will try to include boxes and buttons. I am also going to make it a game where you fly around as a UFO rather than running and jumping because like I said above making gravity work requires a lot of code that I am not ready to do at my level. In order to beat the levels you will have to use your tractor beam to drag boxes to buttons and unlock the doors.

I will also need some art for my game. I looked at some clipart in class but I am probably going to us Adobe Illustrator. In comms & media we learn’t how to use Adobe Illustrator so I am going to try and make some simple UFO and tractor beam images for my game.