One Button, Two Buttons, Yellow Button, Gradient-Fill Button

Here is some of the code that was basically spoon-fed to us. Not that I’m complaining.

This weekend’s homework involved working through the rest of chapter 2 and all of chapter 3 of Rex Van Der Spuy’s Foundation Game Design With Flash. I very much enjoy working through these tutorials by Spuy, as I find he’s writing in as simple terms as possible and the errors I make are errors made on my side versus lack of clarity on his side. The homework went much smoother than I thought it would. I was able to finish in roughly two hours without getting too stressed out. Thankfully, I had a friend help me out when I did get stuck. I found out the hard way that Flash is particularly picky when it comes to naming conventions of course, having taken classes in programming this isn’t a surprise but that makes it no less frustrating.

And the end of the tutorial this is what I had. Not too shabby if I do say so myself!

There were a few times when I would get an error message and I would have no idea how to fix it- so I would ask Don how he fixed it. It was a simple error in naming the files without capitalizing the “m” in “Main” as was written in the code. I guess this goes into what I learned on my first day of Principles of Programming with Dr. Lewis: Computers are ultimately incredibly stupid. They can only do what you tell them to do- exactly what you tell them to do. In this case, I was telling Flash to connect the file “interactiveStorybook” with the file “Main” but the only file that existed was “main” and so the computer said “Sorry. Can’t find it.” Another small issue I had that I can’t seem to solve is when I press the “back to start” button to go back to the start page, the two buttons going to the hill and the pond are stuck in the yellow color they are when the mouse hovers over them. Any idea how to solve it?

Though I have had experience with programming before, I am a little bit nervous still about programming in the future- especially in a new language. I’m a little worried about spending hours on hours trying to figure out how to work with arrays and lists (both I absolutely despise) in order to get a game working right. It’ll be fun though.