Flash game final version

Having tested my game with a few people I have decided to make further alterations. The biggest change was to add a timer, like I previously questioned, this firstly made the game harder, as setting a time limit forced the player to make quicker judgements, and therefore miss more often. To combat this I decided to add a choice of difficulty levels, which was achieved simply by passing different values to the variables which allocate the time and shot allowances. However by adding at timer and difficulty setting I affected various other game play mechanics. A small problem was now physical space on the title screen, where I had one button and a description before, I now needed two and a substantially longer explanation, so to get around this I added a third button which sends the player to the rules section, leaving the main title page free of clutter.

A bigger problem though, was the fact that the game now had three possible outcomes, win, loose through lack of time, or loose through lack of ammo. This meant dragging different parts to the stage based on numerous conditions being met, leaving my code being full of ‘if’ and ‘else’ statements, and weird values being passed to variables to try and stop one code interfering with another. I feel that I achieved my goal, but have produced a mass of code which given more time and a better skill set, I am sure could be shortened.

To introduce an outside factor into my game, I found to be a real challenge. This wasn’t because of a lack of skills, it was purely down to a lack of ideas. I wanted the factor to be something meaningful to the game, so having a news headline feed, or the equivalent, on the title page would have been useless. Instead I decided to use the computers clock to get a rough time scale based on the hours count, and if it was passed 7pm the hunting would take place in the dark. Below is a screen shot of the game during the day, you shot ducks and they explode, however below that is a screen shot taken between 7pm and midnight. As you can see there is a new backdrop which has been called in, to replicate the night sky, and now if you shoot the ducks they turn into devil and angel duck ghosts, with a spooky sound effect. This doesn’t change the basic game play, but is a way of using an outside source to change the game slightly, whilst still being true to itself. And finally, yes the tractor is now animated during daytime play.