Game#7 : Frogger

Game#7 is under way. This is Frogger, an old game where you have to dodge the traffic and jump across the river on the logs and (diving turtles).

Some oddities with this. Much of what you can see was almost trivially easy. It's basically just wrapping objects. Though the wrap doesn't quite work, as the logs are made up out of chunks, and using Wrap they became just a little seperated leaving black lines.

The interesting stuff comes with the adjustments for levels. I wanted to give all the objects a "groupID" - so the logs are built up of 2-4 bits of log, all of which have the same ID, and the turtles in the same groups all have the same ID. Allocating these automatically was quite tricky.

Then I wanted to remove some of the river objects on higher levels, again programatically so this involved picking a log/turtle group, checking it wasn't the only one (otherwise you couldn't get across ....) and deleting everything.

Then I wanted the turtles not to all dive at the same time. The dive animation was done with animations, so I had to delay the starting of the animation using a timer so they are all mixed up.

All of these things could have been done just by allocating instance variables "start it now" "drop this on level 4" but it was a better learning experience to do it the harder way.