For the midterm I wanted to do some kind of video game. I felt that it would be more fun and ironically more interactive than an interactive artwork. Originally I was stuck on the idea of Russian Roulette but that lead me to the idea of a Mexican Standoff. The premise of the game is that two players are facing each other and after a countdown they each have to shoot before the other player does. Furthermore, I wanted to prevent people from just holding down the shoot key so I made it so that if you shoot too early you fail.
I wanted the player to first see a main menu before they start the game. I was inspired by some of the previous works of students on their midterm and wanted something similar but also unique to my game. However, before I could start making it I had to find out how to do so. In class, I don’t remember which one exactly since it was a while ago now, I asked Pi about something to do with different pages/menus and he told me about a scene management class. That is a function or part of the code dedicated towards picking different menus. This ingenious solution was what I needed, and for that reason I put Pi in the credits menu for my game. Furthermore, Pi told me about game state machines and more about states in general in games, that concept helped me a lot during the creation of my project. I was proud of the code I made for the scene management class but not as proud as the code I made for the gameplay. A lot of work went into making the actual game itself and I wish I could show more of what I did without it being too boring but in any case; below is what I am most happy with.
function countdownFunctionality() {
// frame rate is 60
gameStarted = true;
let x = 1;
let xSecond = 60 * x;
let firstSecond = initialFrameCount + xSecond * 1;
let secondSecond = initialFrameCount + xSecond * 2;
let thirdSecond = initialFrameCount + xSecond * (3+randomNumber)
if(!(tooSoon1 || tooSoon2)) {
// TODO sounds
if(frameCount < firstSecond) {
countDownDraw(3);
}
if(frameCount > firstSecond && frameCount < secondSecond) {
countDownDraw(2);
}
if(frameCount > secondSecond && frameCount < thirdSecond) {
countDownDraw(1);
}
if(frameCount > thirdSecond) {
countDownDraw(4);
player1.update();
player2.update();
fire = true;
}
}
}
Above is the code for the countdown. I needed something that would (obviously) act like a normal countdown, going from 3 to 1 then to the words fire, but I also needed to have the program be able to detect a player firing at any point during the countdown. This meant I could not stop the program completely but still needed a way to add a delay. I chose to do this through essentially counting frames. Where when the function is called the frameCount at the time is kept and then the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and final seconds are kept as a number which the frameCount has to be greater than for the appropriate icon to show. Then at the end of the code you can see the line “fire = true”. Fire is a boolean variable that was initialized outside the function and it is used to keep track of the states of the game, like Pi taught me 🙂 When it is true the players are allowed to shoot.
There are also a lot of general things about my code that I’m happy about. Primarily the way that I organized the code. I created a separate javascript file for each menu as well as the scene management class. This made things easier to navigate. Furthermore, going into this project I decided to use visual studio code instead of the website editor, I wasn’t sure how to at first but after some figuring things out I learned I had to use extensions, I found the specific extensions then spent a while learning how to use the extensions in the first place.
While the program works now, there are A LOT of things I would change. I added a lot of files thinking and sometimes trying to add them but eventually giving up because I ran into some kind of bug. If you end up going through the files you will notice this, and if you go through the comments you will notice that I wanted to add some extra features. I originally wanted to add a best of five game-mode but because of time constraints I had to give up on it for this project but maybe next time. Another thing I wish I could get to work, and there is still time is music that plays specific to the play menu and not just the main menu music which plays all the time. I haven’t been able to figure it out just yet because I was experiencing some bugs but I unfortunately cannot put aside time to do it at the moment, perhaps in the future, maybe even before class. Anyways, that’s all I have to say about this project. I’m happy with it overall, it is the most effort I’ve put into a coding project and the most lines of code that I’ve ever written, and I think it shows. I hope people have fun playing it.
P.S. The credits to all the people that have helped me and all of the people that made the sprites, images, etc. are in the credits section which you can find from the main menu.
6th March 2024:
Fixed a bug where if player 2 shoots too soon then player 1 does as well it shows that player 1 shot too soon and not player 2.