Make Project 2013: Alien planet

1. Make Project 2013: Alien planet Ben and Sid

2. Our Inspiration • We began our project during the middle of the year, and not intentionally either. We were assigned a “dreaded” scratch project and I, being Ben, asked Sid if he’d like to work on it. As we began working, we decided it was an awesome way to make a cool game, all the different scripts that allowed for a range of actions, it was amazing. We had to give it up as we moved onto NXT, but we wanted to hold onto the idea, so we decided it would make and interesting make project. We hoped that by the end, we’d be proud of the final product and our newfound learning of a “programming” software. In this presentation, we will go through some of the things we encountered, how we dealt with them, and how our project changed during the process leading up to now. Death Scene at The beginning Of the Game

3. The Team • So first off, team meetings were not a favorite. These were sporadic and unintentional in most cases to be completely honest. These meetings were spent changing our plans based on how fast the project was moving. These provided a good sense of communication, not that we lacked it originally. The way we assigned tasks to ourselves and each other varied very little. Almost all of the time Ben worked on the documentation, which allowed for quality focus onto the topic and less distraction from what we needed in that area. Sid was always engulfed in the project, be it designing new levels, fixing bugs, creating new script, anything to improve the project. Ben would occasionally work on the scripting when a specific design idea came into his head. This was designated from the beginning, that being the original project. To represent the truth in the best way, you can look at the game and documentation to show the effect of our hard work and true dedication from both Ben and Sid on this project. We both felt very obligated to provide for the group and only put in the best effort we could. Some of our first documentation

4. First Steps • The idea of research was kind of lost on us, because we had already started, and the wasn’t exactly a great amount of research to be done. There was some done as more complicated ideas got brought up, but that’ll be mentioned later. From level 0, or the prologue, which is where we left off last time, we wanted 5 levels and a boss level. Obviously, this was a bit too much to ask, as we only ended up with 3 and no boss level. There were disruptions along the way, such as absences and large bugs, but we pushed through and got a strong final product. The inconsistency of Scratch is atrocious, as many of my classmates may be able to testify from the Scratch assignment earlier this year. So much of this was trial and error, if not all of it. We just had to put more script in, play through it, see what happened, and change more script. This cycle was tedious, but the encouraging feedback and constant flow of new ideas drove us forward. First level we made displaying some of our new features

5. A few days in • We realized this was going to be a very long and hard process. After numerous, completely uncalled for and seemingly unsolvable bugs, we considered scrapping the project and trying a programming application such as Stencil instead. We even began disliking documentation while we were at it. Everything that stifled our progress became irritating, and sometimes we’d spend 10-20 minutes on a sole bug that kept coming back. We decided to stick it out because everything else was too hard. We turned things around here, as we looking on YouTubefor help. This changed everything, as we found a video that created gravity for a character. This allowed a whole new aspect to the game and opened a ton of doors. This was the push we needed to continue. Then we started collecting feedback. This helped as well, as the first rating we got from Jacob was a 2. This frustrated me (Ben), to no end, as I refused to accept that as a consistent rating. Everything seemed to improve form this point on, ratings, game quality, documentation quality, everything. Using the jump feature for the first time

6. Final/Changes • We ran into an issue coming into the last 2 weeks. We wanted 3 levels and a boss level at least, so it could still be a cool game. Sadly, time was running out and the glitches started rising again in greater numbers. We just barely finished in time for the presentation today, completing the final cut scene Tuesday. When it comes to changes in plan, this is how our ideas went: 5 levels and a boss, this is terrible with too many bugs, lets switch soft wares, whoops that’s way too hard, 2 levels and a boss level, 4 levels, 3 levels and a boss level, and finally, 3 levels. This doesn’t include the prologue, but that was left untouched through out the entire project, a small reminder of what we began with. We also changed the game in many ways in our process as well. A small list of what needed to be changed: add gravity, background colors mess with gravity on cut scene, just kidding but leave it, ground color won’t work so change that, need aliens, smoke is wrong color, same with text and arrow, remove arrow, add shooting cause lasers, more aliens, level design is off, no walls, can’t fix it, gun won’t work levels 2 and 3, find out last day how to fix it, fix it, make more sprites to make things easier, more sprites, more variables. That sums up a lot of our thought process. The Video

7. Conclusion • In conclusion, we felt great finishing the project Tuesday. That sense of accomplishment is one of the best feelings you can have at school, that and acing a test. But that’s beside the point. Really though, this project went great, there were tough steps, and we weren’t able to meet our original goals, we put so much effort and time into it, we’re very proud. It was successful in the sense that we finished and learned a TON from Scratch, maybe even more than we’d planned. If we could do things differently, I (Ben) would try to focus more in the time given, I think if I’d used that time better, it could’ve been better. There are some other things that I couldn’t of controlled, such as more overall time, but that would’ve been nice. Overall, I loved the experience and the chance to use my writing ability to articulate our long and arduous process in creating this game. Now, questions? Final Screen: Last thing we added Into the game