Museum Scramble
 

I created this game as a final project for a class I just finished. The game a is first person word puzzle game. The player is on a field trip to the museum and gets lost. To escape the museum, the player must click on objects to discover alphabet letters, and unscramble the letters to create a word that will allow them to move to the next level. There are 4 levels of play that have different themes, and successively more difficult word scrambles.

I work as a children's librarian right now, so I wanted to make something that children might enjoy playing. The main problem people have had while playing it is my poor collision detection. When navigating the rooms in the museum, it is very easy to accidentally end up outside the room you are in. If players mainly use the left and right arrow keys, and are patient between each tap of the arrow keys, it works better. I have the collision set to go backwards if you get too close to something, but if you back into something, it bounces you back even farther, outside the game play area.

It was fun to create! I hope you enjoy. Any constructive criticism is welcome.

Oh no, It looks like it is too big to upload at 59MB, how else can I share this?

Thanks,
chrytobug

Sites like google drive, mediafire, or dropbox.

Alright, I swear I could have figured that out, but it was a long week. :o

Here's the link to my game file:
[URL="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzSZzCRaet5VYndib2Zma1l3b1k/view?usp=sharing"]
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzSZzCRaet5VYndib2Zma1l3b1k/view?usp=sharing[/URL]

Thanks!
chrytobug

I tried out my link to the file and it works fine even though google drive is showing the contents of the a2w file like it is a zip file. Just download and run in Alice. If anyone has time to check it out, I would love some feedback.

Thanks again,
chrytobug

I tried it out and to be honest it was quite fun :)

A few things:
First off and the main problem PERFORMANCE, it was horrible, using about 70% of my CPU and lagging pretty bad, and I know its not my computer as it is a gaming computer with a powerful processor and a decent graphics card. I dont what the problem is as it did not go away after a few minutes of debugging.

Every level gave you the same instructions which is not really needed after level one.
The collision detection was bad, moving backwards just kicked me out of the room, try having it move the player towards a dummy object in the center of the room (make sure its at the right height).

It had some funny humor, the animations were nice and the gameplay was solid, overall good job still needs some work (mainly performance), but other than that its quite a good game :)

Thank you for the feedback. The collision detection really was terrible. Having the camera move toward the dummy object seems like a much better idea. I read somewhere that the billboards can slow performance. I wonder if that made the performance so bad, since I used quite a few of them inside the various rooms.

Thanks again for checking out my game. I really found the forum to be helpful during the development process. I am grateful to everyone who maintains it.

Thanks,
chrytobug
Chrystal Woodcock

That probobly would be it, maybe having something that only keeps them on when you are in that room, thus only 2-3 would be active at the same time (setting texture on/off).

Collision Detection
 

Hello,

I have not looked at the program yet, but if you'd like to see examples of collision detection that I have implemented in the past you can view these two examples:

Maze Game: a simple, easy-to-understand collision detection that uses an algorithm to detect when a player object collides with any dedicated square object.
[url]http://www.alice.org/community/showthread.php?t=4301[/url]

Counter Strike example: a much more advanced collision detection method which is based on the maze game, but implements modular quadrants to reduce lag by disabling the collision detection of certain walls when you are far away from them
[url]http://www.alice.org/community/showthread.php?t=6255[/url]

Thanks! I will take a look at your games. The collicion detection was the hardest part and caused the most problems when I have had people play it.

Thanks, Chrytobug