Blazing Games - Dozen Days - Words - History Bomb

Dozen Days of Words: History Bomb

Making of History Bomb

Time is development time not real-world time.

Tuesday January 19, 2010
0:00 - 1:00 Skeleton
The Tenth episode of Dozen Days of Words is a trivia game but unlike the earlier Trivia Bomb (episode 8) game, the players are required to sort the order of events instead of just answering a trivia question. It will be presented as a typical television game show. Players will play through a number of rounds (probably 5) where they must correctly sort the order before time (a bomb that has a burning 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 up-coming evenings. Obviously it is very similar to TriviaBomb so that game will form the basis of the skeleton.

Wednesday January 19, 2010
1:00 - 2:00 XML and Test Data
The XML format for the games puzzles was worked out and a set of test questions have been worked out.

Sunday January 24, 2010
2:00 - 5:00 History Card layout
Created the History Card Class which lays out a question (though the XML parser has not yet been written). The elements are handled through a separate HistoryElement class which was also written.

Monday January 25, 2010
5:00 - 8:00 Parsing XML
Got the card to actually use the XML game data. This should not have taken as long as it did but due to the fact that E4X doesn't do any element tag name verification, referring to ELEMENT as ELEMENTS resulted in the program not working with me banging my head trying to figure out what was wrong. This is the reason I like strong variable typing as this type of bug is caught by the compiler.

Tuesday January 26, 2010
8:00 - 9:30 Element handling
Implemented the scrambling of the order, the win check, and the handling of moving the elements up and down.
9:30 - 10:30 Proper Game-play
Getting the five rounds to work.

Wednesday January 27, 2010
10:30 - 12:00 Fine Tuning
Cleaning up the display. Adjusting the scoring system and time limit. Start card with summary of instructions. Minor changes to about and title screen

12:00 - 15:00 Researching Instructions
I was going to have 20 questions, but after three hours I only came up with ten, so I figured that it would be enough.

Thursday January 28, 2010
15:00 - 16:30 Encoding questions
Converted my questions into the XML that the game uses.