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Blog Response 5

Creating Priorem was a real experience for me. If I were to do it again, I know there are better ways of setting up the game then the way I did. I think I would explore the idea of using iframes. I don’t really know much about them, but I think I could have used them to pass information without reloading the webpage for every room. That’s definitely something I would have done.  I would have made it so that the entire game loaded on one webpage instead of each level on it’s own. I also would look into using databases instead of my multiple json files. I think that would have been a more efficient way of storing data. I would also have added in some sort of introduction page to the game. I realized only at the gallery that the idea of the game is not self-explanatory and if I had added in more text just to explain what was happening, it would have made a lot more sense in a gallery setting. I am really proud of all the work I did though. Every part of this was a struggle that I overcame to make it all work together. I’m not sure how to pick out three things. Everything was so cohesive and layered on top of each other that it’s hard to separate it all. Everything was much more technical then I anticipated and I’m really proud of myself for sticking it out and getting it to a point I was happy with. I’m proud of myself for all the work I put into it. There really were multiple weekends that I would spend 30+ hours working on this game, and every notebook I have has jotted notes of my just daydream thinking about it. Mostly, I’m really proud of myself for pushing my boundaries and doing something that I had never done before, but had always been interested in.

  What didn’t I learn doing this really? I expected to be writing the game primarily in HTML which is something I know, but very, very little of it was. The majority was written in javascript which is something I’m much less familiar with. So I taught myself a lot of javascript. I also had to learn how to write server-side scripts in php and how to access them from client side files, which meant learning a bit of ajax to get that done. Really every bit of this was something new to me, and that’s why I’m proud I came out with anything at all. This could easily have been way too far over my head, but I managed to figure it all out and come out with something I was really proud of.

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The finished game.

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As a last minute change, I've altered it so that there are nine pairs of locked doors at any given time in the game instead of the old seven. I think this will make it a little more challenging and interesting.

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I've set it up so that after 30 seconds of inactivity, a message will appear warning players of the soon-to-be reset. After another 30 seconds, the game will return to the title screen and place a skull in the room that the player was sitting in.  

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I've now set it up so that when you reset anywhere in the castle, it marks you as dead and places a skull and crossbones of your players colour in the room that you died. When that colour comes around as the player again, it erases the skull and cross bones from before, so that you cannot run into your own dead body. As you can see, the placement of the skulls isn't 100% yet. This was formatted to work on the big school computers, but it is the idea that I'm going to fix it so that this will work on any sized screen.

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I had my friend design a title screen for the game, and at first I was super excited by it. Now though, I'm not sure I like it as much. I think I'll ask people in class what they think, and maybe I'll change it around a bit more to make it fit better.

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Falling Stars

Dear Ursula,

  I am absolutely the most excited about your project “Falling Stars”. From the second you started talking about it I’ve been really invested in how it was going to turn out, and when I’m explaining what this class is about to other people, yours is always one of the projects I use as an example. I really love the simplicity of it. It’s just lights tied to the ceiling, but I think once you sit down to experience it, it’s going to be relaxing and make a person feel something. The idea that you can view the night sky from all around the world in this small little section of the gallery is really cool to me. A big black box in the corner of the gallery is definitely something that’s going to draw people in, and it’s really going to seclude your project and make it an experience of it’s own. I think it could be expanded on (as I said in class one day) by covering the entire ceiling of the gallery in lights, but I understand the brightness issues, and I think you’re doing an awesome job of compensating for that. I think the more lights you have, the better it would look, but again I understand the time and money issues that surround this project, and again I think you’re doing an amazing job with what you have. Yours is absolutely a project I’m looking so forward to seeing.

  Good luck, and keep up the good work,

Dallis

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Currently, I'm in process trying to draw the "dead" players in the rooms that they died. I've made skull and crossbones in the colour  of each player sprite, and I'm trying to write a JSON file that will keep track of which room each of the sprites are in.

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I've finally set it up so that the message you get when you run into an unlocked door is the colour of the player who locked it. The way I did this was by changing my JSON file. Before I had all locked doors set to "true" and all unlocked doors set to "false". I changed it around so that now the unlocked doors are still set to false, but the locked doors get set to the colour of the person who locked them. That means I'm passing an extra parameter to my lockDoor function. It also means that every time i tested for door == true needed to be changed (which I missed quiet a few of the first time through). I think this ended up being a really elegant solution to the problem though, and I'm really happy with the way it's turning out.

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Everytime you lock a door you can check the JSON file to see which door has been unlocked. (This wont be part of the game. It's just debugging.) I'd been having trouble with the game locking too many doors, but I think I've fixed that now.

(x)

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I've created a new aspect to the game in which the player starts as a different colour every reset. I think that gives people a better sense of "dying" if they get trapped and of really starting over. I've passed the colour the same way I passed the last page through the URL. The eventual goal is to set this up so that when you run into a locked door the text that appears will be in the colour of the person who locked it. I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to do that though.

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I was having trouble with the JSON file in that it didn't seem to update automatically. I had to keep opening the page in its own web browser before the game would recognize that it had been updated. Thankfully, it was a simple fix. I had to set caching off so that it wouldn't keep reloading the old version of the file. 

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I ran into an issue where players could unintentionally lock every door in the first room. While that's something I want to be able to happen other rooms in the game, having it happen makes the game unplayable. Every time a person would start, they would have no where to go, and no chance to unlock any of the doors. To fix this, I set up a system where the game checks (only in the first room) if the other two doors are locked, and unlocks one of them accordingly. (I didn't bother setting up a randomizer for this. I figured it would feel random enough to the people playing.) (Picture 1)

To keep it so that the same number of doors were locked consistently I set up a function to lock a random door somewhere else in the game. (Picture 3) I built it so that it wouldn't lock any of the doors in the first room, or any of the rooms attached to the first one.

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Now that I have door locking functionality, to keep the doors consistent throughout the games I had to set up a randomUnlocking function. I was having a lot of trouble getting"data.doors[randomRoom].randomDoor" to work (it wasn't registering randomDoor as a proper string for some reason) so I had to get a little creative with it. You can see that it picks a random number for a room, but then I made an array with each door option in it and picked from one of them. It's a bit messy but it works, and will break out of the while loop once it finds a door that's locked. The problem then was that the unlockDoor function needed to know which door was picked to unlock it. So I had to record which of the four room choices were picked and change them to strings for that function (which thankfully read the strings the way I wanted them to). So now every time the player chooses to lock a door it begins by unlocking a random one. I had to put it first, because I realized the potential of unlocking the door that the player had just locked.

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I have set up my game now so that every time you lock a door, it locks it's pair. Before I was running into issues where you could choose not to lock a door but it would be locked anyways because the doors would only lock one way. That lead me into walking in circles, re-locking the same doors over and over. I'm thinking that this way will make more logical sense as well as give the players more control over their game.

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I greatly underestimated how hard all of this was going to be to do. I finally, finally figured out how to overwrite my json file with new locking information. I actually wrote the PHP file a few days ago, and it just wasn't working so I just sat down and debugged it for hours. I finally got to the point where I realized it wouldn't let me change the file permissions, it wouldn't let me write new files, it wouldn't let me do basically anything to do with file manipulation. So I was feel pretty down, and I didn't know what I was going to do. I assumed it was part of the server permissions that I wasn't allowed to write to files and that was going to be a real problem. But then I was looking at fetch and I saw the info tab and right there I could set the permissions of files, so I set them to write and it suddenly worked! Part of that was super frustrating because I spent  hours working on this when I had correct code the entire time, but the other part of me was just happy things were working.

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This will always be the current working model of the game, as at this point I need to be constantly uploading it to the server to test.