SKILLS CHALLENGES

Introduction

Try to solve these Game Maker challenges. Explore, read the hints, try out solutions. It's a good way to learn. They have been developed by Bill Kerr.

Download skillsChallenge1update.doc
Learn the Game Maker techniques for making sprites, randomising, shooting, destroying, following, goal scoring, timing, platform jumping and pushing.

  1. A ball bounces around a room and its direction is random. When the demo starts you can’t predict in which direction the ball will go. When the ball hits the walls you can’t predict in which direction the ball will go.

  2. Make an animation from a strip sheet of stills.
    a) one where all the slides are the same size (easier)
    b) another where the slides are of varying sizes (harder)

    3. Download: stripSheets.zip

  3. A character can move left and right with arrow keys (you have to keep pressing the key for it to keep moving) and fires a single bullet forward when you press space bar. You have to release and press space bar again for more bullets

  4. When a bullet hits a character, the character explodes and the explosion then disappears

  5. Make one object follow another object

  6. A ball goes through a goal and the score goes up by one…the score does not go up if the ball misses the goal

  7. Make a timer which counts up or down how much time is left to play

  8. You have to hit a character 3 times with a bullet before it dies

  9. A character fires a bullet and has to wait one second before being able to fire the next bullet

  10. A character jumps up off a platform, and return under the influence of gravity – you cannot jump from midair

  11. Push a rock

  12. Do it yourself: Make one of pong, soccer, sokobahn or space invaders

Guidelines:

You may help each other as much as you like but you must write the code for the solution you hand in. You are expected to learn so if you get the code ideas off someone else make a real effort to understand how it works

Teacher will provide hints from time to time. You can ask him questions at any time – this is helpful – but he won’t always give you the answer.

Suggestions of ways to find the answers: