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Advanced Lingo For Games
by Gary Rosenzweig

Chapter 8 Section 5

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, this game is very customizable, perhaps more so than any game in this book. You can not only change the objects in the game to represent different things, but you can also change the metaphor of the game without altering the code.

Educational Variants

Because the object of the game is to catch "good" objects and avoid "bad" ones, you can easily adopt this to education. The "good" objects need to fit a certain criteria, for instance, "countries in Africa." The falling objects would be country names. The player is then faced with the task of identifying the continent that the country is located on before deciding whether to catch it or not. As the game play continues, the correct answers are reinforced with the sounds and score changes that occur as the player catches country names.

The same idea can be applied to words in any set. You could have the player pick out primary colors, or prime numbers. A language game could have the player select adjectives out of falling words. Just about any subject can be adopted into a "falling objects" game.

Changing Perspective

Why does the top of the screen have to represent "up?" You could paint a background of a river, with a boat rather than a glove. As the boat moves up the river, the player can move it from left to right to pick up floating objects.

The same idea can be done with a street and a car, an airplane, or a spaceship. With some modification to the code, you can make the objects go from left to right or right to left instead of top to bottom.

Adding Animation

A sprite does not have to contain a static bitmap member. It can contain a Director film loop member. This would mean that the objects would animate as they fall. The only difference this would make is that the game will look nicer.

Increasing Difficulty

To make the game a little more challenging, you can make the pieces fall diagonally or randomly move left and right while falling.

This would require some changes to the code, of course. A diagonally falling object would have to change its horizontal location while falling.

This would make items harder to catch, and might even take some items off the sides of the screen while falling. This can just be a hazard of the game, or you can include code to make sure that the items reverse direction when they get too far to the left or right.

Catching a Bomb

One variation of the game that might not be readily apparent is that you could set the "pEndGameCondition" to "Catch Number of Bad Objects" and set the "pEndGameNumber" to 1. Then, include a lot of good objects, and just one bad one that looks like a bomb.

When the player accidentally catches the bomb, the game ends. Perhaps in the end game frame, a huge explosion occurs to drive the point home. This makes for an exciting and tension-filled game.