End of the Semester

Well the end of the semester has come. It once again seemed like the usual... a frantic race to the finish. Me and my group members were unable to complete a fully functioning flash game but I feel we made a great effort and got a lot done. As a whole, our group came up with fantastic ideas that the Globalaria team according to their feedback, seemed like they really enjoyed. Our game had a great mixture of not just learning the importance of eating well but also raising awareness of conserving the worlds non-renewable resources and simply teaching its players the importance of budgeting in todays world. Our game consisted of a front screen with two types of foods to choose from: imported and local foods. The imported foods cost less money but at the same time use up more oil because of the distances that the foods travel. The locally grown foods do not use up nearly the same amount of oil as imported foods but cost more because of the maintenance and care those foods require, plus they are much more nutritious and don't have the unhealthy preservatives as imported foods have. The front screen as mentioned, also has a oil bar and a money meter. The oil bar continuously goes down with the purchase of each food, more for imported foods. The object of the oil bar is to conserve the oil as much as possible while budgeting your money and not going over the $6,000 budget in 52 weeks that is in place for you. If you can conserve oil, save your money as well as stay healthy for 52 full weeks, you win the game. During the time that we had, we were able to gather all these ideas and begin creating our game but were unable to finish. We discussed with Globalaria that if we were to finish our game, we would have liked to expand the game and make it a little more difficult. We thought of adding things such as other life-altering problems like troubles at work, maybe losing your job which would contribute to losing money. Maybe if you run into health problems you have to cut into your food budget and spend it at the doctor's. Globalaria seemed to like these ideas. I had a lot of fun imagining and creating this game and loved our ideas. I feel our group worked very well together and we were able to get a lot more done than we thought we could. Overall, I enjoyed this game design class and learned so many things. Before this class I had never used Adobe Flash or Adobe Illustrator. Now I know how to draw pictures or trace objects in Illustrator and also know how to create games in Flash. This class also inspired me to purchase a Mac computer (which I love!).