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.

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.