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For my first week I learned a lot about yo-yoing. There are three main types of yo-yos, fixed axle yo-yos, brain yo-yos, and ball bearing yo-yos. I have a fixed axle yo-yo which is the worst type for doing tricks. The first trick I going to learn is “the sleeper” which is where the yo-yo spins in place at the bottom of the string before yo pull it back up. The problem with fixed axle yo-yos is that it is almost impossible to make them “sleep”. The yo-yo I would like to get is a ball bearing yo-yo. They have an axle in the center, then a ball bearing around that, and the string goes around that so it can freely spin.

I also learned the proper technique for throwing a yo-yo and practiced it a lot. I used to simply drop the yo-yo and move my whole arm to get it to come up but I learned you need to throw it to get it spinning and if you just flick your it will come up on its own.

For my second Genius Hour I’m learning some yo-yo tricks. I know how to make a yo-yo come back up but that’s all I can do with a yo-yo right now. I found a Youtube video going through ten starter tricks and I am going to go through them and try to learn all of them. I also need to find a good yo-yo to do all of the tricks.

I think my presentation went well. I didn’t have much time to work on it because I spent so much time coding. I would have liked to add a few things such as the original plan and how I wasn’t able to find an expert. I was a bit worried about not knowing what to say because I didn’t have much time to practice.

Over the final weekend I had a few friends and family over and I showed them the games I had made. I also polished my game a little bit and added some details to it that I didn’t have enough time to show in my presentation. I am starting on a new game following another Youtube tutorial that I will be doing on my own time.

The movement was very uncooperative. I figured out the rectangle and I was able to make it work. After that I started with the actual movement but I kept getting an error for the movement. After quite a long time I found that I was missing a few symbols to make it work. After that the movement was okay but then the draw window part wasn’t working. It didn’t show any error but whenever I started the game there wouldn’t be any background or UFO. I thought the movement might have somehow messed it up so I got rid of it to test if that was what was causing it to not show up but it still wasn’t working. I decided to go through the original video. I started watching it from the start in order to make sure I’m not missing anything and just altered a few things for my game. I made it to the movement part and it and the draw window are working fine now.

It was much harder than I expected to get the sprites into my game. I made them quite easily but I needed to email them to myself to access them on the raspberry pi. I added them into my code and tried to draw them on the surface but it wasn’t working. I thought it might be just one of the sprites but I tried them all and none of them worked. Then, after more time than I would have liked, I realized I was missing a piece of code to actually draw them. When I figured that out it worked but they had a white background which blocked the actual background. In order to fix it I put them in photoshop and deleted all the white around them so they would have a transparent background. Then I had to email the new versions to my raspberry pi and put them into my game.

After that I started on the movement. In order to make movement work you have to make an invisible rectangle to represent the character then move that and make it so the character moves with it. I haven’t had time to figure out why but the rectangle isn’t working. Tonight I am going to work on and hopefully figure out why the rectangle isn’t working and then I’ll finish the movement and make the level throughout the week. I also worked on the script for my final presentation.

Over the weekend I looked at coderbyte but it would not let me sign in for whatever reason and I found found out it’s extremely expensive. I have been trying to look for other potential options but it’s hard to find any python game developers. I don’t know if I’ll have enough time to find a developer but I’ll look during class time and I’ll work on my coding during the week.

I am going to make the sprites (characters, objects, etc.) in Comms and Media class today. I’ll have to figure out how to send them to my raspberry pi in order to be downloaded and put them into my game. I sketched them out and figured out what I want the dimensions to be so it shouldn’t take too long to make them in Adobe Illustrator. I decided on a level layout so the level will be split into two sections that each have a “puzzle” you have to solve. The movement and gravity will not be very realistic because I do not have enough time or skills to make them. I will try and be more consistent with my working schedule at home so I can finish the game in time.

It’s becoming harder and harder to find stuff to do in class. I can do the blog and plan for my presentation but my coding has to be done at home as well as videoing the games. I’ve found an expert, coderbyte, so now I just need to get in touch with them but to contact them I need my personal account. I worked on my game at home a little this week and there haven’t been any major problems yet.

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.

Coding is harder than I thought it would be, I am still going to try and make a puzzle platformer game but it may not have as many things as I originally hoped it would. I was doing more research about websites to learn how to code and potentially interview and found a website that looks promising. It’s called Coderbyte and has many different coding softwares, including Python, to learn about. It also includes an easy space to be evaluated and get tips about your coding.

Over the winter break I should have lot’s of time to work on the tutorial and I will make sure I am done it. I hope I will have extra time to work on my final project as well. During the winter break I will try and keep up with my blog posts but they won’t be as detailed as they are now.