games write up.

This project has been the one I’ve got most stuck into. I’ve learnt loads from it, and feel I’m getting a solid grasp of Flash in practice and its possibilities.
I didn’t really write much of the code in the games but took existing bits and tweaked them and put it together (though many thanks to Anna, Szymon and Pete for helping out loads). Major things that helped this work were the actionscript games book by friends of Ed, which is brilliantly simple and for the most part reliably written (though Szymon found a bug, good lad). Various blogs, which is where all this works - you have to be constantly finding answers and alternatives. I don’t really go in for tutorials much because I can’t seem to follow them, the shorter ones are effective, but for me the best way to learn is to pull stuff apart and rebuild it.
There are loads of little problems in the games I put together, such as the timer going wrong on the second time round in the sheep herding one. Also all the links go back to the intro rather than the snow scene (I should have done this as a separate FLA). One of the major issues was sound, it's well documented how rubbish sound is in flash. There are many weird glitchy problems that you have to solve along the way. In shoot wolf i wanted to turn the track down and leave the fx loud, i put in the mysound.setVolume(?20); command to turn it down but this worked until the first wolf was shot and then reverted to original volume - if anything i'd have expected it to carry on getting quieter as it would run the code again and the figure is a percentage. I couldn't work this out and instead altered the levels in logic pro.
Other issues are the return to main page buttons. most buttons use the brilliant geturl command to link to HTML pages. though like a fool i made the intro a scene in the index so it always goes back there. This is a bit of a shame but is easily fixable it just needs some dull page making work.

Despite the many mistakes in this I’m pleased with the results, I learnt to play a bit of piano especially, and as said before learnt a great deal. Flash is a really exciting (if infuriating!) program, and is part of the mediums where I really want to progress with during this course. I'm really interested in making games that use microphones and webcams, and this is something i am looking into.

(attached is a picture of the keyboard i used for the soundtrack. the classic SK5, which i got for 50p from a charity shop)