Reflection

Just to conclude and summarize though the game is not completely finished I did meet my aim which was to make a game that implements the Wiimote.

I will however continue to develop the game despite not finishing for the deadline set. I will continue to work on the score and visual effects within Sandy 3D and try to apply a more real looking bitmap material to the walls. I will also see whether or not I can get the walls to randomize so they appear in different places and not set ones.

The game in itself is very tricky, and at this point in time I can just about make it to the 5^th wall without crashing, but it’s not meant o be easy and surprisingly requires quite a lot of skill in the form of exemplary hand and eye co-ordination.

If you would like to play the game or/and download the files you can access them at:

http://davidsdomain.co.uk/final_project/Sandy_ScapeEvader1_2/ScapeEvader/ScapeEvader2.swf

I’ll keep you posted for any new developments.

Finishing Up

Though the meat and bones of the game had been developed there were still some remaining Issues such as I was unable make the walls appear in different positions at random due to some strange clash between the way AS3 implements its random method against to how Sandy 3D does it for its primitives. I’m use to how it should work in AS but since I used a Sandy primitive to make the wall it would only work using their random method. I tried to manipulate the method to how I wanted it but I kept getting odd results like a wall size increase.

As you may tell the aim of the game is to fly past as many walls you can before the plane crashed. Every time you flew past a certain number of walls the plane would speed up (through speeding up the movement of the walls towards the camera).

I used Sandy 3D primitives to develop the title screen (plane), instruction screen (plane), game over screen (plane) and buttons (boxes) and made the primitives to respond to mouse events by enabling them to button mode. The images on the primitives (i.e. the title picture, button labels etc) were made through creating a separate class for all the images and applying a bitmap material that accessed the respective image class and applied the image to the primitives. I tried to use the same technique to create material for the walls however I couldn’t get the image to tile properly so in the end I applied a simple colour material to the walls.

I tried to implement a scoring system to the game based on how many walls passed but it was proving tricking through Sandy as the text field you had to set up was not responding to the code and time was running out, so I had to leave it out.

Also as I’m not use to Sandy, it was near impossible to create effects such as explosions when the plane crashed. The particle function just didn’t work, let alone follow the plane. Still the game is very functional.

I didn’t do know vigorous user testing but my family played it and thought it was quite addictive.

ScapeEvader Game Title Screen

ScapeEvader gamplay; the plane has to make it through that gap in the centre

Wii Controls

I’ve had to change the game again. This time because the Wiimote is not responding to my plane as I thought it would. Firstly trying to get the plane to move with two Wiimotes was a nightmare. The Wiimotes didn’t correspond together plus it was tricky trying to move the plane up and down or left and right as if you swayed to rotate the plane, the plane would move to sharply up and down. This whole system was just not suitable. I developed a new system that would just work with one Wiimote with twisting the Wiimote to make the plane rotate and moving your hand whilst holding the Wiimote left or right to make the plane move likewise and the same with up and down movement.

This system didn’t work either as twisting the Wiimote through rolling it made the plane move left and right with sensorX as well as rotate the plane. As a compromise I had to get rid of rotational movement for the plane as it is more important that the plane moved left and right then rotate.

In Order to move the plane left or right you'll

have to roll the wiimote left or right

Moving the plane up or down through moving 

the wiimote up or down 

Sandy Game Development 2

As mentioned in a previous blog, Sandy 3D makes use of Actionscript. This was good for me as I’m use to Actionscript 2. Despite that though due to Wiiflash only using Actionscript 3, I had to use AS3 as well to program Sandy 3D with.  Though I’m not use to AS3 and it is quite a change to AS2 there are a lot of similarities so it wasn’t too much of a change however one crucial distinction is that with AS3 you always have to add event listeners for any event as events are all integrated into the same event handling architecture.  This means as long as the event listener is added all events from that event class will respond there eliminating the need for callback functions, making the coding shorter and more reusable.

Sandy 3D itself has its own classes, packages and functions. However I was having an issue with the collision detection. Sandy 3D does not have a particular system for collisions and suggest you incorporate an external physic engine called WOW. However after trying to use WOW I couldn’t seem to get it working with my models I therefore had to develop a make shift collision for the game which basically works on the distance between the airplane and the walls and the space in between the gaps of the walls. See diagram below for more details.

Diagram explans how the collision works in the game

Sandy Game Development

Though Sandy is able to accept 3D models it still has its limitations. After importing my cityscape model into Sandy 3D and programming it to gradually move backwards towards the camera (giving the illusion that that the plan is moving forward), flash started to move slow. I deduce that this was down to the size of cityscape model. However after several times of scaling the model down in 3ds max and also through the AS3 Geom Class Exporter plug-in 3ds max, there was no difference. Changing the frame rate also didn’t seem to make a difference. I also imported buildings in the cityscape individually but with each building I imported Flash ran slower and slower.

I was stuck not knowing what to do. I was originally just going to accept it and work with a slow moving game but that would disrupt the other element to the game, the Wiimote controls. I decided therefore to not use the cityscapes and use walls made from simple primitives that the player had to dodge instead. The game is also now called SpaceEvader.

Cityscape buildings in Sandy 3D which I had to exclude in the end

City Buildings replaced by walls instead