Day 1:
On the first day of the project, it was a lot of brainstorming and figuring out what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to do a rendition of flappy bird but change it around. I kept thinking how I could do but have the same idea of obstacles and etc; I finally settled on making an airplane that will have birds as obstacles and we will be keeping score as well as measuring altitude maybe? That will be so if I have time for it.
Day 2:
On the second day of working on the project, I got to work setting up the ground/ocean first. I did a very basic rectangle to act as the ocean with a white border at first. After I was okay with where I wanted the ocean to be in, I started to work on the clouds. For my clouds, I created 5 ellipse, made sure I liked the placement and then made three duplicates in different x placements. I originally created three clouds only but when it came to looping the clouds there was a blank space coming before it looped and I didn’t like that (see video below) and so what I ended up doing is adding a 4th cloud that you can’t originally see (out of frame) but comes into frame with them and takes the space of the blank space while the far right cloud is working on it loop, removing the blank space between them and creating an endless loop in a sense. After I liked how the clouds looked, I wanted to create a similar affect with the ocean to seem like waves were going up and down and back and forth. For this, I looked at a bunch of other codes to get an idea of how I wanted to go about the code. Taking a little bit from everyone and editing the code to work with what I wanted (speed/direction/location) I was able to create a somewhat realistic ocean. After I had created that, I realized I coded the clouds to go in the wrong direction (needed to them to go from right to left instead of the left to right I had coded as the plane would be on the left side and I wanted to make it seem like the game was moving with the plane). I fixed that and then also edited the ocean and called it a day.
Video of the blank space:
Video of result of day 2:
Day 3:
On the third day of the project, this is when we got to the hard part and the part I had the most difficulty trying to attempt. So first, I created obviously the plane because that’s the main component. I used three acts to act as the wing and an ellipse as the body and then tiny squares as the windows. Once I had created that, I tested out the movement to see if it would (didn’t need to since the plane will not be moving left and right in this game but just to see if its in one piece) everything was fine. Next, I started to work on the birds. There was no great way to make the birds in my opinion, my creativity only goes so hard so I used an ellipse as the body and then two arcs as the wing. I would have liked the arc to flap but I felt like if I had time, I could add that in later if not, its not necessary. Now, this is when we come to the difficult part of the game. The Interacting part. I’m going to be honest, there was a lot to the game I wanted to add but had extreme difficulty incorporating so had to push some stuff to the back. I wanted the birds to appear at different y levels while also having some gap between each bird. I first attempted to use the random function but that kept making the birds appear way too fast one after the other. After a while, I figured I was put the random function in the draw function and it was making it do that. Once moved to setup function, it stopped doing that. Our next obstacle however was how to make each bird spawn at the same X start (just slightly to the right of the canvas side so we cant see it) and a few of them appearing on the screen at the same time with gaps between them. This is when I reached out to my friend who does coding and we both started working on this part of the program.
Video of them spawning too fast:
Video of the bird but every time you refreshed:
With the help of him, we reworded a bunch of my program, introduced this to the program as well as new constructors and using .move .display, etc; it not only made some functions easier to read and understand but also cut down some of the code so its not as bulky to look at.
In this video you can see we added score, we added gravity, we introduced two birds at one time. The issue now that we were facing was allowing the plane to jump alongside with the gravity pulling it down. Right now, everytime you pressed the space bar it would refresh the whole game making you basically restart everytime you tried to jump. The functions were there now we just needed to put them together. I left this for Day 4.
Day 4:
New day, new problem. We were still facing a lot of issues and we were losing time on working on the project. We needed to remove the space bar issue so instead what we ended up doing is using the up and down arrow, giving the user more control over the game and removing the refreshing issue. We also fixed some of the bird issue so that there is more of a gap between each bird and overall the player is able to play the game better. Our new problem was collision and death with the player. This one we spent over two hours trying to figure out and it kept giving errors after errors and once we fixed the error, it wasn’t doing what we wanted. I had emailed the professor and I got new code with him but when I tried to implement that into the game, it was ruining the whole progress for some reason. I don’t know what we were doing wrong but I wasn’t able to incorporate the winning/losing aspect of the game quite how I wanted to.
Video of the final game:
Overall, even though I couldn’t make the project quite how I liked it, it was really fun seeing all the aspect of the games come together. It was a nice challenge to put myself to. I wish I had a little more time (I do not know why I thought this was due on Thursday, but I should have started it earlier, I miscalculated how long this would take me to do). After this class ends and all, I might try and finish the game. I enjoyed this class and all of which I learned. I can see myself using the information later in my life. I will definitely be recommending this class to others.
Link to the game: https://editor.p5js.org/sabreenap/full/weTl_vz0x