Here is the latest update to Beneath, the game that I have been working on for my final project in ds106. There have been a number of changes from my last update:

First, you’ll notice that there is now a title screen introducing the game and providing instructions for playing. One nice side effect of this is that when the game starts for real, I can have the music begin as well. It used to wait until you moved to play the music, to avoid bothering folks just browsing around on my site.

Next, we now have more story. There is a not-so-nice person in the room with you, who moves around the room and talks to you. Nice. This was actually a fairly tricky bit to add in. The Ogmo map editor I’ve been using allows you to associate path information with objects. So the purple character might have a series of x-y points associated with it, corresponding to the different places it is supposed to walk to in the game. But then I needed to add some intelligence to the game to load that path information script out the characters behavior – moving from point to point, stopping for different periods of time at each point, and perhaps saying things at different times. I think the approach I used, though, is general enough that I can set up other characters and scenes without too much trouble.

Next, there are now more things you can interact with, and a small puzzle as well. Depending on the order in which you do things in the room, you may not see everything, so feel free to try interacting in a different order too. (trying not to give it all away here).

Finally, there are some minor tweaks, like moving the message area to the top of the screen and making it stand out more.

For my next update, I’m going to work on incorporating some sound effects, and hopefully doing some work on the next room.

Just FYI, I’ve noticed that on older versions of Flash it runs unusually slow. I see this, for example, in the Trinkle computer labs. So if it seems “too slow,” you might want try a different computer, or upgrade your Flash.