Monday 12 December, 2010

I apologize for not posting on Friday 10 December because on that day, I missed the second half of school and did not attend ICS Class.

Today, we had the much anticipated Programming Test #2. Sadly, I really messed up my test. I could have scored perfect because the test was simple, but for the final part of the test, we had to write functions and call them into action. Sadly, I fell for the trick and declared a variable called length. Identifiers cannot have the same name as keywords, and that's where I messed up on. If the program was executed, then there would be errors, because I named one of my variables the same name as a built-in function. Besides that mistake, the rest of the test was straightforward and I'm confident that I didn't lose any marks anywhere else. The mistake that I made costed me at least 2 marks and at most 6 marks, so my grade ranges from 75%-91%. I am very angry at myself for not taking this opportunity to boost my mark and now I'll have to work harder to bring my mark up.

Luckily, I have a head start into the final leg of the ICS race. That is, I know how to make a flash game (well, not really). Anyways, like I mentioned before, I created a program which features the user attempting to control the movement of a square and make it to the end of each level. The game works perfectly now, although I'm not sure how I'll reduce the code line because each level is completely different and requires a completely different set of code (currently, my program is 1000+ lines for 3 levels). Therefore, I am going to stop working on this game and focus on another game that I have started to program.

My other game features the user, a circle, attempting to "eat" circles that randomly appear on the screen. Each time a circle is "eaten", another circle is added to the tail of the circle that the user controls (like the snakes game). If the user touches its own tail, a red circle, or the edges of the screen, then the game is over. The circles that appear feature random colours, with less frequent colours worth more points. This game is very difficult to make, due to the complexity required to control the movement of the circles which trail the main circle. When the user changes directions, the whole tail changes directions too and is consistently following the main circle. Also, if the user hits its own tail, then the game is also over. Determining the hit is easy, but because the number of circles in its tail increases, you would have to create an array of n value where n would equal the maximum number of circles the tail can be comprised of and ...

It's all very confusing, and I'm not sure if I'll successfully complete this game, but that's what the Christmas Break is for, right?

Anyways, I better hurry and finish polishing my essay, which is due at midnight, tomorrow.

That's all for today (YAY!!! NO ICS HOMEWORK!!!)!