This is Patricio and this week is my week to write.

Our session was off to a shaky start when we received news that Peter was unable to attend. But the snacks laid out on the coffee table soon made us focus on the task at hand: kicking up the heat on our little games. Our assignment was to create a few levels of difficulty.

Susan wowed us with fast cupcakes and faster toppings. She modified the initial game by making it the goal to get the falling toppings all changed to cherries. We identified some possible improvements including: progressively smaller elements as the levels get higher; have a half-made cupcake that gets filled with falling toppings, get the right filling (cherries for instance) and accumulate filling or else lose filling (and points too) if you get the wrong filling (cream for instance).

Another addition that Susan thought would be interesting is the addition of a memory aspect that tests the player’s recall of the combination ‘flashed’ to the him/her at the beginning of the game. Basically, the user needs to recreate the combination.

Rosemary perfected her albatross game significantly. The vertical scrolling game was much refined by using a very retro and totally fun pixel look. She added shadowy fish schools in the water that extend the player’s life (with a great ‘fish in mouth’ indication). Icebergs now cause the bird to lose power. Rosemary is going to great lengths to make this game accurate so that we all learn something of the life of the albatross by internalizing the game logic. For instance, icebergs are a major hazard since these birds glide close to the water and make use of the air pressure above the waves to generate lift. Wow, it works! I didn’t know that before I played this game.

We arrived at some bleak philosophical questions when our scrolling game sea world finished and a endless black section began (a current bug in the game). Where is the end? Where is the beginning? Who am I? Finally, we mused that this could represent an underwater section or even a night version of the game.

Rosemary was worried that the way the player (bird) turns left or right is a little annoying since it turn directly left or right but rather on an angle. We reasoned though that birds probably turn straight left or right by reducing speed and ‘banking’ left and right. This is probably more accurate to bird flight anyways. Rosemary seemed convinced.

Jim’s baby brain continues to work on “Baby runs this mofo” making the interaction swifter and more gratifying. A baby arm is now a cursor inviting the user to mess with the whole room! Susan’s character now emits word balloon’s. Susan, when provoked by baby, tells us that she is busy trying to finish a crossword puzzle. Since we’re a baby genius we realize the word she’s looking is ‘whale’ so we push a toy whale on the floor to her feet.

The scenario, shot at Jim’s mom’s house is great for this version but he thinks that he might reshoot it at home. This would give him the opportunity to load up the game with more interactions. There was one suggestion that he could switch the baby interface so that Susan’s head on the right and the lamp on the left get activated by pushing buttons that are respectively on the right and left (rather than how it is now). Also, Jim is considering making the speech bubbles into sound rather than text (closer to a baby’s world).

I totally shifted gears with my game. I started working on my game using Greenfoot, a Java for beginners interactive programming environment, which should some promise. After trying to make a game with it I starting realizing that although it had a good interface it had crappy documentation. On top of that when an error occurred it didn’t actually tell you where that error was. So I turned to Processing, a Java-like programming environment for artists and designers. I knew Processing but not for game programming. It’s not really made for that but I figured that I might be able to figure it out.

So, rather than doing Ants at a Picnic, I began working on Bungee Fisher. I used a physics software library in Processing to simulate a bungee diver bobbing for fish. I drew the artwork in Illustrator and used Photoshop to export them as PNG (a good format for overlaying sprites since they have a good transparency channel). The slog is a little tougher since I have to write the collision detection and score keeping and health monitoring by hand but for this reason I kept the game logic simple.

The session ended with some talk of an open house in April where we could show our stuff and get other people to show what their currently working on. We also talked about forming a group to do TO Jam.

Then the talk degenerated into puns: first with ‘getting off the ground’ (Rosemary’s albatross), then ‘diving head first’ (my bungee diver), then to ‘icing on the cake’ (Susan’s cupcakes), then ‘shedding light’ on it (Jim’s lamp switcher), then ‘milking it’ (Sidney was breast-feeding at the moment), then keeping abreast (Rosemary’s contribution), and finally having a whale of a time (Jim and Susan tied for this one). We were clever for about 6 minutes then quickly disbanded.