Weekly Sprint 10: Finish Line!

Wow, has the time gone by! I can’t believe that we are almost done! Usually, a typical senior response would be ‘I don’t ever want to leave’ but, let me tell you, I cannot wait until I am out of here for good!

This week has mostly been about keeping up with small bugs, adding a few requested features, and banging my head against a wall trying to figure out the one major flaw in my game. Luckily, I am almost done!

We will start with the bugs that I fixed. I now have an official game over message that brings you to a simple black screen that prints out the game over message, the score, and asks you if you would like to replay or quit. Pretty simple. I have also included a new way to score more points, by killing a snake. If you kill a snake (by jumping on its head) you will get 10 extra points. I think this will help nudge the competitive leader board aspect to a new level come showcase day, because it is really hard to jump on every snake and collect every coin in the level. The score also no longer goes below zero for reasons of moral support and increased motivation to play after losing points. I’ve also added some animated clouds to the background to help give the game more movement. In that regard, I have also made the water animate as well, as per a classmate request. Turns out, animating coins is a real pain so I have put that to the sidebar at the moment. That’s enough with the animations!

As per another classmate request, the controls for the panda movement have now been expanded to WASD key controls, in addition to the arrow keys. Personally, I think it is harder this way, but some people really seem to like it.

As mentioned earlier, there is still one big problem. The biggest issue is that when the panda hits the snake from its right hand side, even with all three lives, the game immediately ends. This is because the snake recoil sends the panda bouncing off to the left and does not account for the fact that it is hitting from the right. My main goal over the next week is to try and fix this!

That pretty much wraps up all of the progress that I have made this week, and I am very excited to show my final product for the showcase coming up! I think that I have made a lot of great progress over the past semester and learned something new and fun!

Only nine days to go!