It’s just over a week until my Flash assignment is due in, and I’ve changed my mind again. Don’t worry, hopefully it’s a change for the better.

The original idea for the project was to build four or five different mini-games, each one demonstrating a different type of game play, to cover all of the requirements for the assignment. I’ve now ‘finished’ two of the games, and was just about to start planning the next one when I decided to review the requirements – and discovered that what I’ve already developed pretty much cover everything I need!

So what do I do? Build the games anyway? I could do that, but even though the game play will be different, the mechanics behind each game would be very similar, and won’t demonstrate anything more advanced. Wrap it all up and call it a day? No, that would be too easy. I’m very much aiming for as good a grade as I can: A or bust!

So I’ve decided the best thing to do is build more advanced features into the games I already have!

Right now it’s imposable to lose either of the games. Sure, it is possible to end up with a negative score, but I’m not sure that that is really ‘loosing’. To combat this I’m putting some enemies into each game. I’m also toying with the idea of adjusting the score received for various different actions.

The ‘collect’ game currently features a character controlled by the keyboard running around a dungeon collecting bags as they fall from the sky. The ‘enemy’ in this game will be fire. Much like the bags, fire will fall to the ground and injure the character if it touches him. Different score values could be based on the colour of the bag, with the higher score bags appearing less often, or maybe some type of timer-based multiplier, where collecting two or more bags in quick succession gives a vastly improved score.

The ‘bounce’ game features prisoners jumping out of a window, which then need to be bounced across the bottom of the screen using a raft controlled by the mouse. The ‘enemy’ in this game will be… I don’t know yet. I could go for fire again, with it jumping out of the window, but I don’t think this would be very realistic, so I’m considering exploding barrels or something. Once again, different score values could be introduced via different items being saved, i.e. saving a prisoner would be worth more than saving a bag.

As each of these games features enemies, I also need to consider the fact that the player might die, so I also need to think about implementing some type of health meter or a number of lives, and working out the best way of displaying this information (i.e. do I just display a health percentage, or some type of progress bar).

Ultimately, I think I have the ability to do everything that I’ve just mentioned, but I do have a lot to think about… so I’m going to get to that right now.

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