Straight-Shooting Development.

Just Shoot Me was born from a desire to be able to take out aggression, and the previously gathered knowledge of Flash objects & hit tests and their incorporation into a multi-player game.

We encountered challenges galore on this little "journey" -- from how to create a scoring system all the way to creating multiple targets and keeping objects that once worked from breaking when a "little more" action script was added to make the game that much cooler.

Lisa's Schpeel: As a graphic designer by day, Lisa created graphics for this game by night. (Very late nights, by the way.) She molded found graphics into what the group wanted them to be -- a 2-level shooting game.

She organized a Google group to help organize project efforts and upload files back and forth group members so work could be shared. She created both background graphics for each level, as well as the targets for the Carnival level and the game title screen.

She also created the graphics for and programmed HTML page for the final project "wrap-up" that you see here.

Lisa did some initial (very simple) coding, but most of the code-experience was taken in while watching John, Emily and Matt figure stuff out. Someday she will be the "coding goddess" she's always wanted to be. :)

Emily's Deal: Emily was responsible for designing the targets and some animations for the park level, making a preloader, working with matt to fix any bugs in the game, user testing, and adding the sounds lisa found to the game.

Emily's experience working with developing a multiuser game was hard. She admits there were nights spent having fights with Flash. The biggest frustration with working with ActionScript was the typos. She struggled trying to get the certain functions to work only to find out that there was extra code and just the fix was as simple as fixing a variable name.

Designing the animations and characters for the park was fun, as was figuring out how to randomize characters and learning where code on a movie clip is appropriate. Before working on this game shei had a basic idea of how to put things together and now she can say that her level of Flash knowledge has greatly improved. All in all Emily says, "This was a great selection in team members because with Lisa's awesome graphics, my and Lisa's animations, Matt's server knowledge, and Matt and my ability to code and fix bugs has made JUST SHOOT ME a true success!

Matt on the Real: Matt is a late-night, bug-repairing threat! After the completion of this project, he will most likely pull a Rip-Van Winkle to make up for lost zzz's.

Matt took on the challenge of enabling the "multiplayer" game-play using ActionScript. This required the use of the Flash Media Server and in the application, shared objects became the crux of the project.

Matt was responsible for "sewing" together the multiple project files and adjusting the actionScript to mesh properly. There was over 20 versions of the game passed back and forth throughout the development process.

He was able to solve many of the problems that cropped up from multiple "hands" working on files and for comic relief when most of us wanted to pull our hair out! He and Emily spent countless hours beyond the midnight hour and into the early morning overcoming hurdles as one problem fixed was another found.

In closing...

Our group, despite the huge amounts of blood, sweat and tears that went into the making of this game, are very happy with the final result!