CODE FINAL

The following is a work in progress. This is the development of the first Blight the Clown video game.

The idea first began as a sketch.

I wasn't happy with the first idea, so I made another sketch.

After this drawing, I decided to write out a small bit of pseudo code to help me conceptualize how to go about coding the game.

  1. A gun
  2. A clown
  3. A ball
  1. if the left arrow is pressed
      then the gun moves left
  2. if the right arrow is pressed
      then the gun moves right
  3. if the space bar is pressed
      ball shoots up from gun tip
  4. if the ball hits clown
      clown screams and falls off the screen and a point is scored.

Once I had the basic idea, I began a series is PROCESSING sketches to figure out how to code this thing.

So far I was able to get a moving rectangle at the bottom of the screen and a ball that bounced back and forth at the top of the screen, my next goal was to try and get it to shoot a bullet. With much trial and error, I managed to get a bullet that shot at the gun rather than shooting away.

I got stuck at this point, my 2 weeks of coding experience had run dry. So I needed to seek the help of my coding teacher, Kunal Patel. With his help, I was able to fix the bullet. I also wanted to replace the boring shapes with something a bit more interesting.

I was not extremly thrilled with this version, it needed much more, so I decided to draw up some better graphics.

Once I got the new graphics in, I hit another brick wall in my coding skills, so I sought out help from my teacher again. Together, we fixed the glitchey bullet, added a collision element(the egg splat) and got the score counter to detect when the clown was hit with an egg. Later, I added a background song composed by ChVad SB, using the Minim library.

In the future I plan on developing this much more. I will be adding a start screen, more sound effects, difficulty levels, more elements to toss at the clown and much much more. So stay tuned for the final release.