The concept for this game seemed pretty simple. At its core, Pressure Drop is just another shooter game. What, of course, made it interesting was the context, namely ITP. However, what Leah and I didn’t realize was that creating a shoot game using ActionScript 2 can be very complicated. From the beginning, we encountered problems with the code that slowed us down. The first problem was simply getting the player-controlled pawn to shoot. It took us a week to get that up and running. Nevertheless, we tried to keep the development process moving forward by creating and adding other objects while we were working on the shooter. This helped, but it did not get us past the next problem we encountered.
Once the pawn was shooting, we had to get its shots, the Energy balls, to interact with the other objects. Unfortunately, that took another week to set up and when we finally achieved an interaction, it wasn’t the one we wanted. By this point, we only had one day left and that wasn’t nearly enough time to complete the game.
Ultimately, it was the amount of detail that ActionScript required that really slowed us down. Variables need to be passed constantly from class to class and getting the right syntax to do that was very difficult. Leah and I tried to take code from examples on the syllabus but they only partially helped us since the code we needed was different. It appears in ActionScript only very small changes in a game, similar to the ones I made in creating my first prototype from the Slingers example, will work. Pressure Drop was different enough from the examples so that taking code from one to the another didn’t give us the results we wanted.
Lastly, Leah and I realized towards the end that getting arrays of objects to interact with one another is very different from getting one object to interact with another object or one object interacting with an array of objects. In retrospect, we might have gotten farther if we had decided to allow the Pawn to shoot only one Energy ball at a time.
Leah and I are still very grateful to all those who gave us help: Eric, Sinan and Myra. Thank you.
