Jordan vs. Gaming Hiccups

Remember Jordan? He’s one of our Accelerate students here at Game-U, and he and Erica teamed up to build a space shooter game. You’d think building a digital X-wing wouldn’t be that hard, right? Not so fast! A lot of thought goes into something as seemingly simple as a single space shooter. First, Jordan and Erica added a firing rate, which controls how often the ship’s laser can fire. Computers are not very smart. At first, when Jordan added the laser, just pushing down on the space key would fire hundreds of lasers in a single second – which is a little too fast for a human gamer! But a computer doesn’t know that without being told, so the new code that Jordan wrote teaches the computer to wait a certain amount of time before firing the next laser. That should take care of all the game’s hiccups, right? No, not yet! When the shooter fired, the lasers kept going forever, which means the game kept trying to track all the lasers (that’s a recipe for a crash!). So Jordan also added a boundary that destroys the lasers once they leave the screen. Then he gave his space shooter a target – a rotating asteroid. The game is looking great! Jordan didn’t forget about his RPG Maker game, either. (Remember the game about what cats do when you’re not at home?) Jordan finished the living room and got started on the kitchen. He even added his first event tile! An event is a like a nudge to the computer to tell it to do something. In this case, the event tile tells the computer to switch the player from one to the other. Great work, Jordan! We love hearing about your games.