Emily demoed her Scratch game The Caffinator. She had a fun time animating her sister’s face but it was a little fast, and she also didn’t know why the coffee animation wasn’t working. The other members were able to help her troubleshoot as they had had similar problems: the fast animation was fixed by putting a “wait” block in between the frames and the animation wasn’t working because of a misplaced “stop everything” block.

Next Jim demoed his Space Invader game, a new and improved version of Space Interference that was inspired by the last session when someone accidentally made the second sprite move diagonally.

It was pretty challenging and both Marc and Chris in vain tried to beat it. A lot of great feedback was generated:
-maybe something could trigger a mode where the Invader is frozen and the Warrior is controlled by the mouse and thus can draw whereever it wants
-maybe collision between the Invader and the Warrior could cause a reaction: maybe it could slow down the Invader, which gets pretty fast sometimes, without reducing the points
-maybe a bonus could make the paddles grow a la Arknoid
-the Defender at the bottom could be a little lower to the ground to make it easier.

Emily then showed the room she made with Adventure Games Studio, using the artwork that Sally had made for the game they left:

She was able to implement the walkable and one or two things to Look at, which was cool. She wanted to replace the default character with her art but was a bit overwhelmed by the amount of frames it required to do simple walking around, turning around, picking things up. Chris had similar issues with his 2D sidescroller. Jim was a bit better off with his room creation with LassieAS:

…as he was using the artwork Marc had already made so had the frames he needed for basic walking.

This led to a discussion of the incredible amount of work the animator/artist had to do even with relatively simple 2D or 2.5D videogame projects. For 3D projects the amount of work is exponentially higher, as every texture and shape must be constructed with depth as well. It was sobering but good to see that people had a better grasp of the challenges ahead.