Weekly Blog 9

This week was interesting.  Play testing of my GDD game is going quite well.  The professor and students seem to be responding quite well to the controls of the game, the simple shapes theme, and the fact that our game is built in Java from scratch.  So far we have very fleshed out engine that is able to load maps from image files.  The engine recognizes what colors are in the image and creates blocks that correspond to each color.  A blue block means the user will bounce off, a yellow block is a starting block, a green block will set a checkpoint, a red block will send the user back to a checkpoint and a light blue block will send the player to the next level.

I also forgot to mention that for my HFOSS class, we began a project where we will be developing an educational game for an XO laptop.  This is a super awesome project that you can read about in my other blog posts.  Basically, we are using the 4th grade science curriculum to build a game to teach about the different states of matter.

Lastly, for my Rich Media class, I submitted a pretty much finalized version of my project.  The game is mouse themed.  The player controls a mouse at the bottom of the screen.  The mouse can move left or right into various columns of the screen.  The player must navigate the mouse so it can eat the cheese that falls from the ceiling.  If the mouse collides with any poison falling from the ceiling, the player loses life.  After 3 hits, the player loses the game.  At the end of the game, the final score is shown, and the player can try again.

Although, that accounts for all of the classes that are centered around software development, I should also mention that this week, I completed my second project for my Video Art class.  I wrote an essay about how my perspective was altered through watching the works we watched in class.  Since this blog is mainly centered around developing software and Free and Open Source Software, I won't go into much detail about my Video Art Class, but I definitely suggest looking into Video Art if the name interests you, or you want to experience something new and cool.