For our group game, we decided to use the hider/seeker labs to make a game about running naked through people’s pools while getting chased by police. You score points by being in pools, and if you get caught, it’s over.
We first made a little skin-tone dot to represent the player, and a vehicle chasing it. We wrote the code so that pools would appear in 3 random spots for the sake of variety. But we had trouble getting it to move how we wanted it to (automatically, steering towards the cursor/finger). We ended up with a player character that just teleports to wherever the mouse is clicked. That’s as far as it went for a while.
To solve the movement problem, we just replaced the little player-dot with a second vehicle, in its own class, that chases the cursor while being chased by the enemy vehicle. Collision was still difficult to figure out. We thought that putting the player character in its own class would help, but it didn’t. We also still had no idea how to make the code detect when vehicles were in water, since the parameters/coordinates were randomized. And so there could be no score.
Also, we made the colors awful.
We changed the hideous color palette. We eliminated the player’s class. It’s now just Vehicles one and two — the peach-skinned arrow is the player, and the navy blue arrow is the police. We had to ditch the random pools idea because it made the next part super difficult: vehicle-in water detection, and vehicle slowdown while in water, which affects the enemy slightly more than the player. We’ve got a score-counter going as well. Collision between vehicles now ends the game, with a ‘Game Over’ message as the police escort you off the screen. We had a breakthrough — every mechanic works as it should.
