Project Description |
Benchmarks |
Before starting this project, we had only just scratched the surface of probability. Our goal for this project was to build up our understanding and abilities of programming with starlogonova or scratch(game programming websites)and to program a game that had some kind of meaning to us and at least one random factor. The game I chose to recreate was Plinko. I chose this game because of my old obsession with it when I was younger. It was actually more like an addiction. I'm not sure why I loved the game so much, but I did.
ReflectionAt the start of this project, I had some doubts in my ability to create my game. I wasn't entirely sure of how I was going to program it. I was however at one point a bit ahead of most of the class when it came to the tutorials, so I was able to help out my peers while we worked on that. When I told my teacher about the game I wanted to create, he told me I should talk to one of the Juniors that created the same game last year. The great thing about this was the person my teacher mentioned is one of my friends. This meant I had no trouble going to them for help or if I had any questions. They helped me every moment the could. Without them, I wouldn't have been able to get my game to work.
We hadn't been given the longest time to create our games but if we had been given a period of time before the due date, I feel I could have attempted to create a few little twists on the game. For example, I would have attempted to create a little villain that moved above the point slots. If the ball were to touch the villain, you would lose points. I'm not 100% sure of how I would have done that but it would have been a good attempt. In the end, I am happy with the final product. It was really challenging to get the different pegs lined up. It was also a bit difficult to understand how to get the ball to move/bounce off the pegs when it was dropped. If you go to my game and click "View Code" you can see the different procedures I had to create. The code is a little difficult to understand when you're just looking at it but if you read it like a sentence, it makes a bit more sense. I had a lot of success with finding where I went wrong in my code though. It was surprisingly easy to see where mistakes were made and fixing them wasn't too much of a problem. |
The numbering of the actual benchmarks got a little messed up throughout the project, so I can't number them off with their original numbers. It's too confusing. Our first benchmark was to write a description of the game we wanted to recreate and why. This was to give our teacher a better idea of our thoughts for the project. Throughout these benchmarks, we were also given small worksheets to help us further understand probability.
Our next benchmark was to follow some of the tutorials on our teacher's DP for using starlogonova. Obviously this was an important benchmark because it taught us all the basic information we needed to at least get started with our games. The following benchmark was to write out how we were planing to create our games, using the new information learned from the tutorials. We were to also include the game's concepts and any twists we were thinking about making on the game. Then came the creation of our games that we were to display at our upcoming exhibition. I personally got help from one of my friends who had done the same game the previous year. They helped me to understand more of what I had to do in order to create my game. They explained what their coding meant and how it worked. I'm very thankful for this friend because I probably wouldn't have been able to finish my game without them. After our exhibition, we had to take our game and describe one of our game's random factors and how it played into probability. For my game, I started small and found the probability of a ball being dropped from a specific point and landing into a specific point slot. The importance of this was to show that we understood the concepts we implemented in our games. |