MeAndRedWire @meandredwire-blog - Tumblr Blog

A new game engine for remixing and mashing up games in your browser

Try my game prototype :D

#glass2015 #redwire #tinylegs

Hope you won’t fall ;)

#glass2015 #redwire #tinyLegs

The Texas A&M Physics Department's square -wheeled trike, built by the machine shop. The trike rides on a road of repeated pieces of an inverted catenary.

Why did I choose square wheels? Because they can be useful!

#inspiration #glass2015 #OMGSOCOOL #redwire #science

ouiouiotoshi

The Hardest Button to Button

“Hey kids, you gonna make a game tout seul using RedWire! Topic’s ‘machines’, so have fun.”

*starts hyperventilating*

*but not in the good way*

Code. Tout seul. Even though RedWire is all about cannibalizing other people’s games, if you just can’t get your head around what is syntactically possible in code, no amount of drag and drop may help you.

My pessimistic self is adorable.

In the end I decided not to aim for a game with a) exaggeratedly nice graphics, since this would have been nothing but high quality procrastination, b) complex gameplay. First, I wouldn’t know how to do it, secondly, it would have lead to robots. And c) I totally didn’t want to make a robot game.

After some thinking I found the perfect primitive candidate for this game. It even involves a machine. It has two lights, red and green, that flash on/off, in random order. The player has to button the only button of the machine (see what I did there?), whenever both lights are lit. As often and as accurate as possible throughout a set amount of time.

Amaze. Such complexity.

I will aim for pixel art once more, since I’ve got a crush on them square cuties and I want to level up my game. I need two animated lights (red and green, both on and off) and one animated button (idle and pushed). I want to add a machinery kind of background, but this will be the treat once the coding is done. Otherwise I’ll spend my days pushing pixels instead of fighting the real fight. Concerning sounds, I will probably – if time allows it – just make stupid sounds and tune them using Audacity. Simple. Primitive. Beautiful.

Now for the fun part. Not.

CODING.

With help from the RedWire authorities I obtained the secret power to randomize the light switching. The Boolean values for light on/off depend on the randomly determined values

lightA (red): Math.random() > 0.5 lightB (green): Math.random() < 0.5

and are switched every 600 ms (for now) via Limit Rate, saved as lastRefreshTime in RedWire’s memory.

Now for the even funnier To Do part.

I need to relate the Boolean values to the right sprites (false = off, true = on) for both lights and display them according to their values

I additionally want to create an output after the time runs out to give player feedback on clicking accuracy (kinda like a high score, since a friend of mine is very insistent about high scores and how they improve every game 8947581%)

FRANKENSTEINING YOUR GAME.

(aka “Parts I stole from others”. Long live open source.)

I’ve got a counter that adds 1 to the score on each mouse up. Eaaaaand I’ve got a timer, that counts down for a number of undetermined seconds (atm it’s 20 s, might be less in the end)

Of course I still have a couple of To Dos for these hijacked body parts, too.

I need to tweak the score counter to only count, if the winning conditions (lightA = true && lightB = true) are fulfilled, otherwise it shall not increase the score. Though my basic idea included to count the wrong clicks, too, to determine a percentage of reflexes, attention and perfect clicking.

And I would like the countdown to result in displaying some panicky “Badaaaammm! YOUR TIME IS OVER!” (relevance level 0.63)

Nah, well. At least I managed to change the colour of both score board and timer to the same blue the button has (yeah, that’s how good I am.)

THE ART.