Dozen Days of Words
Episode 8: Trivia Bomb
 Read-me File

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Dozen Days of Words episode 8: Trivia Bomb
copyright (c) 2008-2009 Blazing Games Inc.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA

GNU gave me the following clarification about Flash programs:
As a clarification, for the purposes of Section 3, the Flex SDK
is considered to be the 'compiler' for .swf files and the Adobe Flash
Player is considered to be 'part of the operating system on which the
executable runs'.

REVISION HISTORY
Time is development time not real-world time.

Sunday July 19, 2009
0:00 - 1:00 Skeleton
The seventh episode of Dozen Days of Words is a trivia game. It will be 
presented as a typical television game show. Players will play through 4
rounds where they choose from a list of categories and have to answer a number
of questions before the timer (a bomb that has a buring fuse) runs out. Right
now I am just getting the skeleton ready so I can start working on this game an
hour or two in the upcoming evenings.

Wednesday July 22, 2009
1:00 - 4:00 Layout
While I normally hold of on graphics and animation until the end of a project
like this due to the fact that I don't want to waste time on something not 
related to game-play until the game is fully playable, I am making an exception
today and focusing on a bit of the graphics as I want to have an early 
screenshot for when I post the previous episode on Blazing Games. For that 
reason I have created the bomb, the fuse, and laid out the main game screen. 
The bomb was quite fun as I am creating the bomb, in all it's gradient glory, 
entirely in code.

Friday July 31, 2009
4:00 - 6:30 Trivia Card
The card class handles three different views. The category view just shows the
name of the category. The question view has the question and possible answers,
finally, the explanation view has the explanation for the correct answer.

Saturday August 1, 2009
6:30 - 8:30 Game Flow
Clicking on cards now brings them up to near-full screen. Once an anwer is 
selected, the explanation is shown and the card is reduced in size.

Sunday August 2, 2009
8:30 - 12:30 XML
We need actual questions instead of just test info on a card so to get questions
an XML file is needed. There are 24 questions though I wanted more and the 
questions to be randomly selected, I just didn't have time as creating 24 
questions took a vast amount of my time. I got the code to interpret the XML 
implemented and now round one is playable but there is no time limit or 
round-win determination yet.

12:30 - 14:00 Spark
A simple spark class. Game time tracked. Spark following the fuse.

Monday Aigist 3, 2009
14:00 - 15:30 Proper round support. 
Support for multiple rounds. Pause between rounds.Explosive losing.

15:30 - 18:30 Fine Tuning
Fixing mistakes. Cleaning up some stuff. Actually having the answers ranomized
so that it isn't always the first answer that is correct. A fancier title.
Scoring based on the amount of the fuse that is left. Proper About page.
Added explanations for some of the questions that had those missing.

ABOUT DOZEN DAYS PENTALOGY

The history of the Dozen Days Pentalogy is kind of mixed up. Initially, for
a brief stint when I was going to make Blazing Games have daily updates 
(back in the time when I had hopes of turning Blazing Games into something 
more than a hobby) I decided that I would have a series of games that were
created in a single day. Just after announcing the project, I got a real
third-party project and had to cancel my daily update plans as well as put
on hold the Dozen Days project. 

I then had an idea for a single game that would combine the 60 games
(5 series of 12 games) that made up the planned series. The first epi
was created and then I ended up again putting the series on hold. 

The next time I came back to the series, I decided to go back to the
original game in a day roots and create each episode of the series as a
game-in-a-day challenge. This was successfully done for the first series in
the game, Dozen Days of Dice. In Dice, the only code/assets that I allowed
myself to use was code/assets that I created for earlier episodes in the
series. Code-reuse actually did play a huge part in the development of the
later episodes when I switched from Flash development to Flex development
due to Flex being more Open Source Friendly. There was one problem. Finding
a whole day to develop the game in was proving to be quite a challenge. So
in November of 2008 I had a poll on my site asking if people cared if the
games in the series were developed in a single day or if I could switch
to a multiple-session development format but would still restrict the
development time to under 24 hours. 

For the Second series, Dozen Days of Words, I switched to that  multi-session
format. At the time I am writing that, the series is just underway so I will
update this section when I start season 3 of this game in 2010.

ABOUT DOZEN DAYS OF WORDS

The rules for developing this season is similar to the rules I applied last
season. I will only use the libraries provided with Flash/Flex for developing
the games but will allow myself to use any code/assets that was developed for
earlier episodes of this series or previous seasons of the Dozen Days 
Pentalogy (in other words, Dozen Days of Dice as that is the only
earlier season).

Work will be done whenever I have a few hours to spare. While I originally was
going to have a formal set of blocks set aside, I found that it didn't quite 
work well (see the read-me file for episode 1 for the original plans). One 
thing I am planning on doing is having the development journal for the 
episode as part of the read-me file. Hours will be tracked. My target is still
12 to 16 hours of total development time but will go up to 24 hours if 
necessary. Actually a bit less than that as I round my work times to the next 
quarter or half-hour. Some sessions will be very short as they will be done in 
the evening. Others will be fairly long as they are done on days off and may 
actually represent multiple sessions done the same day.

POSTING GAME ON WEBSITES

This is a flex game that can be compiled with the freely available
Flex3SDK or later. The .as files are the source files for the game.
If you have enough space, I would recommend having the distribution
zip file on your site. If you do not post the distribution file, then
please provide a link to www.BlazingGames.com so visitors can get the 
distribution. 

PROGRAMMING NOTES

This is part of the Dozen Days of Words series and as such was created in a 
single day. There is a development journal outlining how this game was created
on the Blazing Games site.

