THE MISSON
Since there was no eLearning Challenge this week, I decided to catch up on Challenge #51 Font Games and Interactions.
THE INSPIRATION
I Googled “font games” to see what games already existed and I found a fun game called “I Shot the Serif”. It is a game that displays several different fonts, the objective is to shoot all of the serif fonts before time runs out. I decided that I would try to recreate a version of this game using Storyline 2.
THE PROCESS
There were many challenges involved with this project, for example, I didn’t know how I would make the timer. I found that some people stack numbers on top of each other and just show each for one second intervals on the timeline, but I wanted to countdown from 45 seconds, which seemed too large a number to use this method. I found another method in which you make an animation, off stage – I used an oval moving on a timeline with a one second duration. I used the triggers, move the oval on the motion path when the timeline begins, and move the oval on the motion path when the animation ends to make a continuous loop. I then added a trigger to adjust the variable TIME by subtracting one when the animation completed.
There are 4 variables used in this project SCORE, TIME, ERRORS, FIND. The SCORE variable began at 25 because there are 25 serif characters to find. The TIME variable counted down from 45 seconds to 0 seconds. I allowed 2 errors in a game, the player selecting a san serif character by mistake. The ERRORS variable keep track of any wrong answers. Finally, the FIND variable kept track of how many serif characters remained to be found.
I put each character inside it’s own shape so that they would be easier to work with and easier to click on. I knew that I would need to make several states of each character to show a gun’s cross hairs as the mouse hovered over it, and a check mark or a X to indicate if the choice was correct. I also decided to add a disabled state to the serif characters when they were clicked, so that a player couldn’t click on the same letter 25 times and win the game.
I made 3 layers; one if the player ran out of time, one if they clicked on more than 2 san serif characters and one if they successfully chose all of the serif fonts within the time limit.
I added a gunshot sound effect to each character using the trigger, play media when character is clicked. Unfortunately, I found that when I used this method, about half of the gunshots weren’t audible. Instead I inserted the sound effect in the state that showed the check mark or the X and found that that worked every time.
THE OUTCOME
There was a lot of tweaking and trouble shooting involved in getting this game to operate the way I envisioned it. I learned to do some things that I hadn’t previously done and I did a lot of problem solving along the way. I’m very pleased with the end result and think that in this case, my hard work paid off.
