Meddling with Dragons

Remember Prometheus? He works with Game-U instructor Andrew as part of our Accelerate program. Check out the questing game – complete with dragons and superpowers – that he’s been building in Project Spark lately! Prometheus keeps improving the game, and he has a progress report to share.

As the hobbit Bilbo Baggins learned, meddling in the affairs of wizards can lead to very adventurous results…like fighting goblins or tricking evil trolls! Meddling with dragons can be equally dangerous, but Prometheus, at least as daring as Bilbo, has no problem meddling with dragons. Neither does Andrew. The two of them noticed that the dragon guarding Prometheus’ special Vision Power is too easy (!) to defeat. The cause lay in the dragon’s “hit reaction,” which the dragon is programmed to display when struck. Because hits come so quickly, the multiple hit reactions the dragon needs to show prevents the computer from devoting any power to the dragon’s defense mechanisms. So Prometheus and Andrew spent their most recent class creating a system where the “hit reaction” animation only plays every 5th hit. The code goes something like this: every time the dragon is hit, the computer adds 1 to a variable (that’s a special type of computer memory used to store pieces of information that will be reused) called Combo Stack. If Combo Stack is less than 4, the “Light Hit Reaction” animation equals false, meaning it won’t play. If the Combo Stack equals four, however, the animation is set to true, and plays. (Because computers start counting at 0 rather than 1, that “4th” hit is actually the 5th.) But anytime Combo Stack is greater than 4, its value resets to 0, so the code can keep working. Pretty cool, right? The player will have to work a little harder to earn that Vision Power now!

We love your attention to detail and your awesome coding skills, Prometheus. Keep amazing us with your game! It’s a quest worthy of Gandalf himself.