Natalie Rachel

For my ICM midterm, I made a game. After my Applications presentation, and other projects I was working on, I just wanted my programming midterm to be an example of what I have learned over the past 8 weeks. Holy crap, it’s only/already been 8 weeks.

So I focused on Daniel Shiffman’s Raindrop Game in chapter 10 of “Learning Processing“.

My first challenge was just creating the basic game. After checking out Shiffman’s code, and editing it so that my catcher (the mouth) stayed at the bottom of the screen, the basic issue was the speed of the apples falling. The apples, an array of objects, were randomizing their speed too slowly and at too large a threshold- so they were either falling super fast or super slow. After consulting a classmate, we changed the milliseconds between apples from 300 to 800, giving them slightly more time between drops.

My second challenge was creating a Start button that reappeared with the final score after the array was done and the game ended, and would then restart with a score of 0 when pressed again. I found out quickly that it was all about “if” and “else” statements. Oh, and booleans. I love booleans.

Here, play it for yourself: Grab Them Apples!

Basically, I feel like I understand Processing. I’m not good at it, and I don’t foresee myself writing anything from scratch any time soon, but I’m much more comfortable looking at code, and kind of even enjoy debugging. There’s a lot I’d like to do with the game- make the mouth move, add moving clouds in the background, make a High Scores list at the end, etc… but for now, I’m going to take a break from apples and try to think about my next project.