This week I have continued to work on the nutritional game and am feeling good about where it is at. I think that I may now be able to move focus to visual aspects of the site more. I still need to add a difficulty increase over time to the game and add an array of food items to replace the red and green circles currently representing bad and good nutrients for development. Once the arrays are added the coloring will be removed and initially textual nutrients will be in play until I potentially add some visual assets to those objects. This way the game will require more attention and will actually help to reinforce the information being presented above in the html page. I also need to now make the point total reflective of whether a good or bad nutrient is being touched so that the player will lose points when colliding with the bad nutrients… this may be difficulty since the nutrient are being made dynamically and have no specific names applied. Currently I could potentially check color (if that is a createjs capability), but when I switch to arrays this may be more difficult. Although on further thought this could actually be easier if I just check the nutrient against the array.
What I have specifically accomplished this week is fixed the collision detection by making the bitmap image cropped in tighter and therefore the collision area has become more specific, there is still a very small edge that may be evading detection but I could potentially alter the character to be slightly more round since the collision detection code that I am using is based off of radii. I have also fixed the scoreboard so that it also reappears and clears for the start of a new game and I have fixed some styling so that it is more legible for the player. Last week I mentioned that the point total was working incorrectly, with more points being counted per nutrient than should be. This was because with the point total added to the Ticker handler a point was being added for every moment that the nutrient and player are in a collision zone. I have resolved this issue by removing the nutrients from the stage immediately upon first collision with the player. This also has the nice effect of giving a visual cue to the player that they have successfully collided with a nutrient.
