week 03 D

I was able to patch over the scan, for now, using a previous iteration. (Versioning: it saves lives). It's not as done as before, but at least it's working.

Before that, I had to put it aside in frustration and try working on another mini-game to keep up with my 2/week pace. For some strange reason, I went out of order and tried starting on the physical therapy. When one is pressed and stressed, doing something out of order is better than doing nothing at all.

I went back and started on the respiration test mini-game. All I want to do is have the patient hold the space bar to build up breath, then rapidly press keys to release. I set up an array to capture the keys being held down, and erase them as they are released. The problem is that one can simply hold down all the keys instead of rapidly typing them to have them register. This doesn't give the feel I was looking for. I tried only allowing counting the keys when they are first pressed, but it really gummed up my program. Now, I can't get the space bar to register, either.

week 03 C

Things went well in my talk with Mark. (Unfortunately), he made me realize that there is a lot more to work on to do this project right. Although this is an "interactive adventure," there will have to be a lot of non-interactive sequences, as well, to inform the user and to set the user up to play the interactive sequences. One thing we discussed was having a pre-surgery knockout sequence where the user begins counting backward from 100 while blacking out, but only getting to about 95.
The bad news is that when I went to show him my progress, at least one of the files was corrupted. (how)?? It was the scan, which was the best one.

week 03-B

I bumped into a man named Mark who went through a cancer experience with his wife and had been wanting to make a game about this exact thing. So, we should be meeting tomorrow to talk about it.

week 03-A

I did not get as far as I would have liked since last class. I tweaked the two mini games on Thursday. Saturday, I started on the pill-taking mini-game. I worked on it some more Monday and today (Tuesday) but didn't finish it. I should still be able to get it done, along with the respiration mini game before 8pm Friday. (I should be meeting my internship guys this weekend).
The game does not seem like much of a challenge, but I am making it interesting.
Cancer patients have all sorts of different pills they have to take at different times. Of course, remembering when they have to take the pills can be difficult to remember in their ruined mental state. What I have planned to do is have time pass by at a highly accelerated rate. When it is the correct "time," the player should take a pill by pressing the appropriate key. The player only has a 1 second window during the game "hour" to hit the correct keys. Missing a pill or taking a pill at the wrong time will reduce the player's accuracy meter. An accuracy that is too low will be bad.