FlashICT.net

I’ll post in more depth as soon as I can, but this post is just to announce my delight with the release of my new  (and free) educational game - Teacher Invaders.  You can download the beta version just by registering on my ContentGenerator.net forums.

I’ll upload an example game shortly so you can have a go  - or read the thoughts of those who have tried out test versions already.

It is allows students (and anyone really) to play a Space Invaders clone against the clock.  To earn more game time the player has to answer a question every 10 seconds.

My generator program allows anyone to generate their own versions - you enter the question data, select your settings and press generate.  A custom .swf (or .zip) is then produced.  The SCORM options mean that your games can be imported into a Virtual Learning Environment such as Moodle.

As with all my developments for ContentGenerator.net this started out as something which I thought would be rapid to develop but then has ended up taking ages.  Initially I had difficulty adapting the original game, used with permission from Paul Neave, so it would pause correctly.  This was soon overcome though.

I had a version which I got my students to use last year for their revision.  See: http://www.reviseict.co.uk/revision/invaders.shtml. However, I decided to move away from this because I didn’t want to be sued by Taito, the owners of the Space Invaders copyright.  I also discovered several bugs which simply weren’t noticable in my original version, but then took ages to fix.

I thus got some graphics designed - and these were absolutely fantastic.  I was delighted with how effective these looked and this is such an indication of how wise it is to get a professional designer on board when you want something done properly.  The best thing about it was that the designer also loved the game - so his enthusiasm flowed through his work.

The timer that I used - one I purchased from FlashDen - was great when used once (i.e. for the initial countdown) but because it used a setInverval function it kept leaving these running every time it was run.  Thus after a few goes the game slowed down considerably and the timing messed up.  What was the most frustrating was that my intial work didn’t have this error so I was in the unenviable situation that as I developed the game further it actually got worse :(  I spent hours trying to fix this - and it even got to the stage where it works flawlessly in our fast PC but then failed on our fast iMac.  I just couldn’t work it out - until the penny dropped about the problems with setInterval.

In the end I wrote my own timer completely so I had total control over it and it didn’t start up / stop at strange moments.  It was an enormous development effort though.  It seems a bit daft / crass me saying that now it is done but the hassle I went through programming all of this was genuinely enormous.  I’ll post further details later on, but as previously mentioned, you can download the current beta from the ContentGenerator.net forums.