Invadir 21 - What's Next?
This message was sent out to all those who gave feedback on the tutorial up to the moment I completed lesson 20:
Greetings everybody.
You will, I trust, be pleased to hear that the invadirs tutorial has been thoroughly updated with some additional material added, bringing the project to a more satisfactory conclusion.
My sincere apologies for the long period of time between this and the last update, you will appreciate that this is a labour of love and as such can not be prioritised over breadwinning activities where they are pressing.
I am more concerned to reveal that there were some errors and problems in the lessons from 15 onwards, which is where many people seemed to get stuck. I have now examined the tutorial extremely closely, building a movie for each lesson, and I have uploaded director files for the problematic lesson 15, so that you can check the code in a working movie.
As far as I can ascertain, all the code samples now work properly. It could still be that there are a few things I overlooked. Please let me know if you find anything amiss.
I am very grateful for the response I have received so far. Many of you have made some useful criticisms and indicated some errors. Thank you.
I have tried to respond personally to everybody, if I have missed anybody, I'm sorry about that. If anybody has ended up on my "mailing list" in error, I apologise. Please let me know so that I can remove you.
There will, I suppose, be more work on the tutorial later, but I feel that I have now left it in a state where it stands by itself. Please do check James Newton's interesting extension of the material. I'd like, at some point, to make explicit reference to his article in the tutorial. His website also contains many interesting experiments and inspiring examples which could help you with other games. A sensible "next step".
There are some new directions I could take with the tutorial at this point. The one I am most hooked on is to wrap the whole thing in a MIAW so that it can run inside Director. I'd also like to update it for D7, at least in the long term.
Additions I'd like to have made but haven't (yet) are
Keyboard control
Complications with Director 6 mean that this is not beginners
stuff, Director7 uses proper key polling so it is less of a problem.
Cast member animation
I have hinted at this in a recently added lesson, but it is an
obvious part of the whole game building process that, for example,
things explode when they get hit. I have some techniques to make
this quite easy and flexible.
High Score Table
This is, according to many clients anyway, what people play the
game for. I find this a little strange; I've never been very competitive
by nature, so getting a high score to me is of secondary importance
to how much of a crack I have playing the game. A full exploration
of this topic would also include writing external files with fileIO,
setPrefs and elementary cgi scripting.
Splash Screens
Surprisingly, you can spend as much time, or more, wrapping the
game up with those screens which appear while you're not actually
playing. For a real arcade console, this is the part that makes
you insert your coin, so to the suit guys it's very important!
This is a question of packaging. Taste, aesthetics and semiotics
enter the picture: Lots of grey areas to argue about.
These may or may not be added in the near future.
I hope you have found the tutorial stimulating, that you have learned something useful from it. I'm especially happy to have heard from beginners who found it a powerful head start; from jaded score users who always had trouble getting into lingo; and from teachers who already are using the material in the classroom. These were exactly the audiences I wanted to reach.
Clearly, the game never gets to be a commercially viable product without some extra effort. This is all well and good. My best wishes go out to anybody who would like to try and make a commercial product based on the invadirs. I would appreciate a credit, but that's up to you.
Many thanks for your patience and feedback.
I look forward to a richer surfing and multimedia experience when
you guys sow your shockwave seeds.
--
_____________
Brennan Young
Artist, Composer and Multimedia programmer
"When all treasures are tried, truth
is best."
-Chris Cutler