Pseudocode

I need to make a fade in and fade out screen for my game. In between the answers and the questions I want a screen where I can reinforce the lesson they just learned. The question screen will fade into a black screen with words and then it will fade out  to the next question screen.

The most difficult thing I will have to teach myself is probably going to be the moving of the waves on the beach and the thunderstorms and lighting. Honestly though, it's not going to be that hard. I've found my sources by googling 'CS5 Flash Tutorials'. Easy as pie. I'm pretty excited to start working on this part of the class. I have listed my links to the three tutorials that I have found on the right, and also on my wiki page.

Demoooo

I was pretty nervous before I actually presented my demo, but after I got going it wasn't that bad. I think that my demo want prety smoothly, and the experts didn't have much constructive criticism for me. I don't believe that they fully understood Duane's pop-up concept or his question idea for his game and I don't think they should have given him such a hard ime about it. Answering the questions for my game was pretty easy because I have already thought of how my game is going to play out and what kind of gameplay will be involved. I do not plan to make any changes to my game. The one idea suggested to me was to make the game more interactive. Example: The player would need to figure out what kind of medical needs the character needed. I don't like the idea, it's not what I had planned out from the beggining. Plus, it is too much like Virtual Villagers. This experience has made me realize that no matter what the experts say, it is still my game in the end. So I still choose what happens and how I make it work. I hope the others realize this too, because honestly some of the suggestions made to my classmates took away from their game. Other than that the whole thing went pretty well. It was really nice to finally meet Larry T! :D And thank you for the calendar, it's really nice.

Putting pieces together

I have not learned anything from about my topic from making  the game demo. Everything I needed to learn about my topic I learn while doing the research on my topic. I did, however, learn about how I am going to put my game together. If I could suggest changes for the curriculum, I would recommend making the blogs and questions less repetitive. For example, they ask us the EXACT same thing in every blog. "What have you learned about your topic?". Nothing, I have learned absolutely nothing new about my game topic since LAST time you asked us that. We were supposed to do research on our game topic at the begginging of the class. That's when I did mine, and I added it to the blogroll like we were supposed to. It just feels like we are doing the same thing over and over again, and it honestly makes the class boring. I also do not understand why we need to comment on other students in the knowledge community. Because hardly anyone is caught up with us, and many have blank pages. I feel like we are wasting our valuable class time searching through blank pages and endless links in hope that one person has a blog done. Ridiculous. All this blogging is also taking away from the real meaning of this class: game design. I signed up for this class with the impression that we would be learning scripting and coding of Flash games. We are thirteen weeks into this class and I have learned the most about blogging, not about game design. Mrs. Smith is an excellent teacher and she knows the program well, but she is not able to pass down all of her knowledge to us because we are too busy doing blogs that we have already done and updating our wiki pages. I understand that the wiki and blogs are put up to help us organize our thoughts on our games, but re-wording them and putting them back up forus to answer is not helping us learn Flash. It is just peeving us off and making us not want to continue taking this class. I would also make this class only available for high school students. When you asked us to edit our wiki pages, some of the middle school students had up their personal phone numbers and Myspace/Facebook URLs. They were up for several weeks. They are obviously not mature enough to handle being able to edit sources online. Especially when we were told not to add any personal information, not even our last names. Also, I feel as if we are answering our blogs fully and completely while other classes are talking about their dogs and what they did on the weekend. That has absolutely nothing to do with the class, nor does it answer any of the blog prompts given on the wiki. I have not taken learning into my own hands... Because I do not fully understand Flash yet. And guess what? Mrs. Smith can't teach it to us if we are busy wasting our times on blogs. I really hope that in my future I will be able to create an amazing game, and I thank Mrs. Smith for helping us.

I done learned this!

While researching my game topic, I learned the correct order you should look for things when you are stranded on a deserted island, or for that matter, in any survival situation. I've always thought that the first thing you should do is try to alert someone that you are stuck and need help. In reality, you need to find shelter then water, and then worry about alerting someone later on. Two of the sources listed on the sidebar state this inforamation. As for "gaining" understanding of the concept... It really isn't that hard to comprehand. Shelter then water. Simple, but it was an interesting piece of knowledge. I trust these sources because they both say the same thing. Had they both said different things I would have looked it up and done some more research.

Have I said this before?

I have searched through many of the other students profiles and blogs. I can honestly say that I have not found one with the same, or even similar, game idea to mine. Mainly because a lot of students are still doing the mini-games. So I'm not sure how to fully do this assignment being that our class is so far ahead and my idea is kind of... not normal. To touch on the blogrolling, I have many great links and ideas. So trying to slave through pages and pages of students, which are mainly blank, to find one single link seems a bit pointless to me. I have already done the research by myself and I think it is sufficient enough to get me through my game. I am honestly not trying to be rude or disobedient, but I have worked through two class periods to try and find someone else with an idea like mine and I have not come up with a single one.

Vlog?

I see dead stories

I'm using visual storytelling to show the characters journey from the time he / she gets stranded on the island to the time that he / she gets rescued or dies. When the player makesa bad choice the characters facial expressions will change to show the player that they need to change their paths or suffer the consquences. It will help the player learn the topic by nudging them in the right direction. In the playing to learn topic the only game that had an actual plot line was the one where you had to rescue the animals. I'm sorry, but I can not remember the name at the moment. Honestly, other narrative games did not influence my game at all. I'm pretty much doing my own thing, I have not gone back to the playing to learn section to look at any of the game for ideas.

Thought bubble!

The paper prototyping helped me organize all the thoughts that have been floating around in my head. It really did help me organize everything. I had to change a few things because my ideas were just big. And lets face it, I've never used flash before, so I shouldn't be dreaming too big. Some of my idea were just unrealistic. I had to modify a few things, but nothing major. Instead of having three boys and three girl character options, I think I just will make one for each gender. There really isn't a need to have so many. I'm also thinking about making a mini-game that you can play. The player will be able to get to in from the main menu on the game. It will be just a very simple game where the player steers the life boat to the island. You will have to steer around obstacles like sharks, and ocean mines.

Planning to strand someone on an island.

I chose to be a team of one. I don't really like working in a group, especially if the work doesn't get equally broken up between the two teammates. I tend to get pretty bossy when I work in groups anyway. I like to have things done in a specific way and done correctly. I look forward to working alone because I won't have to ask anyone for opinions or help, I can just do my game the way I want to. There won't be any argueing over what to do, whose doing it, or when to do it.

Imagining My Game

My game idea is to make a survival game where the player must choose the right path in order to survive on a deserted island. There will be a map of the island and which path you choose determines where you go on the island. Buttons will pop up and the player can choose which way to go or which item to take with them on their journey. The path they choose will also determine if you get rescued or not. You will have to make very difficult decisions during the course of the game, like whether to choose water over food; or whether to pick up an empty of jug or a knife to help you survive. The user will get to choose the character that they want to be. There will be three male characters and three female characters to choose from.

I'm most excited to make the questions up for my game. As in, the questions about survial that the player will have to answer in order to survive in the island. I'm also pretty excited to make my buttons and my graphics for my game. I really want it to look as nice as possible.

Tiny games

I was pretty excited to start making the minigame. It wasn't very hard at all, it was just a lot of things to understand at one time. I started to think about how I'm going to code my game. I can already tell that it is going to be a lot of work, and I might have to re-think what I want to do in my game. The best part about making this mini game is the fact that we got to work along with Mrs.Smith and she explained everything as we went along. It really helped me understand what each code did. Another good thing is the fact that I never knew how to use flash before. I had only used the program three times in my old Digital Imaging class, so I was pretty excited about learning something new. I think it's pretty cool how we learned to make the game keep score as well. The only bad thing about the mini game is that it is kind of generic. The graphics we worked with weren't that great, but I suppose I shouldn't complain because it was our first game. Since my game is going to mostly a picking game, where you pick either one choice or the other, I'm not sure if I will use any of these concepts in my game.

Topic please.

 I'm Valerie and I've decided to make my blog about survival skills on a deserted island. The players boat will land on an island and the player will have to make tough choices in order to survive. Other people that are on the island will get sick and the player will have to go and find medicine for them. The player will also have to build a shelter, find water, and help keep order on the island while they are waiting to be rescued. The links the I posted here on Blogger will help me research the survival topic by giving me the information I need to accurately make scenarios that could happen in real life. I'll need to know items needed to build a shelter correctly and how many days humans can go without water. One of the links also shows how people can travel via the stars at night. I'm not sure how I will incorporate that into my game, but I thought that was a pretty cool survival technique.

Playing to Learn

I'm probably either going to make a game in the genres adventure, strategy, or puzzle. I love puzzle games like Tetris, but I'm not sure how I would incorporate my game idea into puzzle form. Puzzle games make you think more, yet making an adventure game would surely be more fun for both the player and the designer. Plus, I think there would be a lot more room for my game to grow in the adventure genre. I think the strategy category would best fit the plot I have in mind for my story. But there are just so many possibles that I'm going to have a hard time choosing, but it will defiantly be in one of those three genres.

Protect yourself!

Everyone needs to realize that nothing on the internet is private. There is almost always a way around the privacy settings, and people hardly ever use them. People should realize that the privacy settings are there to protect them, not to get in the way. You see people all the time adding people on Facebook & Myspace that they do not even know, then posting personal information like where they are at that very moment. What if one of the people you don't know reads that and goes to the same place and tries to harm or harass you? You should never post where you are at the exact second unless you are completely sure that your personal information is secure and you know everyone on your friends list. Another thing people should never do is post their home address or work address online, it would just be too easy for an internet predator to use that information against you and your family.  You also see a lot of people posting their phone numbers online saying "text me!". I'm sure that everyone who would want to text that person already has their number and they don't need to be putting it online for everyone to read.

I believe that everyone should use the grandmother rule. Which is basically do not post anything online that you wouldn't want your grandmother to see or read. Teens especially need to realize that colleges & employers are looking at social profiles now. So the rude comments, pictures of them drunk, and the sexy photos that teens think are harmless could cost them a future job or college oppotunity.
 Long story short: people need to learn to protect their information online.

You can find more information on teens, social networking, and privacy here: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/454/teens-privacy--online-social-networks  

Globaloria

We finally got our blogs started on the 3rd day of Globaloria. I'm truly excited to be in this class. I hope that I can really benefit from this class. I thought that game design would be pretty cool, and so far I'm right. I hoping that I pick up the material quickly, it took me a while to learn HTML / CSS so I'm hoping it doesn't take me that long to figure the game design out. I honestly think that this will help me in my future career as a web designer. I'm not quite sure what type of game I would like to make just yet, but I'm thinking that it will have something to do with music. I'm most excited to learn something new. I've already take digital imaging & both web page classes that the school offers, so I think Globaloria will complete the circle for me. I'm actually pretty nervous that I won't pick up the material.