A Sense of Progress

At the start of the game design class, I could sense interest in the students. After all, here they would be designing their own action games! But it wouldn't come easily. Middle school students think in terms of minutes, hours, or maybe days. To think of making a game over months is not comprehensible. Now that we have spent about seven months on game development, one would think that the student games should be complete and polished. That is not the case, although some games are getting there. The progress is in how the students now handle game flow, Flash, and Action Script. They definitely appreciate the time and effort put into professional games.

Getting Our Feet Wet in Flash

My class has continued to work on their games. I demonstrated the tween guide. The students are experiencing the joys and frustrations of programming, where games come alive and then suddenly stall. Layers get mixed up. Timelines get reversed. Games get saved in different files, instead of one. But there's no turning back. I demonstrated the virtues of the transform function. Eyes sparkled as student objects faded to the distance, turned around, and curved in strange ways. The students are starting to move ahead. There is some backsliding, but we are getting our feet on more solid footing. We are jumping from scene to scene, background layers are appearing, title screens are brightened with multi-colored blended buttons.

Story Flash

Flash can be tricky -- in the simplist things. The students are starting their games in Flash, and have come up with unique (to me) problems to things we had already done. Some of them were easy to solve, like why doesn't the paint can work on the graphics? (Make a sealed area to paint in.) Others are more puzzling, like why doesn't the action script box allow anything to be typed? Or how did we do that guided motion tween before? Now, nothing seems to work! But, little by little we are making progress. Students are analyzing their game prototypes carefully. They don't want to spend a lot of time reworking Flash!

Action Script Endeavers with Middle School

My students are becoming adept with vector graphics, symbols, the library, layers, the time line, and setting keyframes. Then, I introduced them to action script. First, I had to review the material myself, and now that I know a little bit more than the class, we are proceeding. The action script is causing some delays, but I think it is important that the students have a few common scripts to use and to see what they can do. So far, we are working with stop(); / gotoAndPlay(1); / on(release) { gotoAndPlay(10); }. It looks like it will take several days for the class to master these (two days of confusion so far), so we'll work some more on that and also tweening next week.