Caroline's Project Update 1

by Caroline Hall

14 Jun 2017

Here is a snapshot of what I have so far:

For Thursday:

  • Complete drawing background
  • Make turtles for user, sharks (bad fish), and coins (points) (STILL NEED TO MAKE COINS)
  • Make instructions at the top of the screen (STILL NEED TO DO)
  • Make controls for user fish
  • Upload other imagery into game (make turtles for sharks and coins)

To be Scheduled:

  • Make point system
  • Make lives system
  • Make UI that comes up with spacebar
  • Make it so that user can pause the game to look at instructions
  • Make it so that different levels in the game result in different computer interaction (faster/more frequent sharks/coins)
  • 3 levels of game play
  • Scoreboard to pop up at end of game
  • User can press button to quit game

Stretch Goals:

  • Animated background that looks more like a reef

I started my final project yesterday at the end of class, so I’m kind of excited about my project right now and the minimal progress that I have made. So far, all I have done is draw the shapes of my characters online, draw the background of my interface, set up the space for my directions and score keeping, and made my turtle for the user look like a cute fish. I’ve begun working on the commands to move this fish around, but have not gotten as far as I hoped as I worked all morning and haven’t had a chance to come back to my project until now since last night. I’m not as far into the project as a lot of other people and still have a ton of work to do obviously, but I’ve been devoting all of my time to this project so far and am looking forward to making more real progress throughout the weekend too.

I think that for my mindset right now, my milestones are ambitious enough. I need to work through the initial steps of the game and get rid of some stress that I have about making the turtles work before focusing on fancier aspects of what the game will look like. I do thin I need to break down my daily goals into smaller chunks so that I don’t feel discouraged at the end of the day when I worked hard for hours on everything and still couldn’t complete my tasks.

So far my group has already been extremely helpful. I’ve been thinking ahead to how I’ll get my shark turtles to come from the right hand side of the screen and they had the great idea of importing time and making for loops that would allow a certain number of sharks to go by for each level.

Caroline is a first year Information Science Master's Candidate. She is passionate about renewable energy and the environment. She spends the majority of her time outside of class working for Strata Solar, a national solar farm developer, and United Solar Initiative, an international solar nonprofit. Find Caroline Hall on Twitter, Github, and on the web.