When you have your idea in mind, you need to organize your thoughts and map out your project. A great tool to use for this is a storyboard. This can be thought of as a visual "script" that maps out the key scenes in your game. In the long run, it will take a lot less time to complete your project if you do a storyboard at the beginning. (This is not to say that your project will not morph and transform as it progresses, of course.) Although there's not much scripting needed for tanks to shoot at each other, more narrative projects would require that a script be integrated with the storyboard. Because the game would consist of only one scene, we decided to actually do the storyboard in Flash itself. If the game had other scenes or views, we would have sketched each one on paper. For the scene's perspective, we decided to look from the top down, even though most ballistics games use a horizontal perspective. We also wanted to make the game easy to figure out and reduce the need for text, which would clutter the screen and be a distraction. During storyboarding, we thought that the tanks would both be on one big island, with something dividing the two sides so that the tanks wouldn't roll over each other. We drew the tanks as squares, with a turret to make it clear which way they were pointing. Each tank, when clicked, would display a pop-up menu, enabling users to angle the turret upward, change the direction of the turret , set the power of the blast, and move the tank itself. To add some variety to the game, wind would affect the trajectory of the bomb. The wind indicator consisted of a circle with an arrow inside and a status indicator below it. The wind's speed and direction would be randomly generated at the beginning of each game. (See Figure 25.1.) Figure 25.1. By creating these crude symbols, I was able to start programming the game while an artist developed the real graphics.
Each player's score would be displayed, and the game would end after one player blew up the opponent 's tank five times. At this point, the players would be offered another game. Although there isn't any text to go along with the game, in some projects you will need to include a script of dialogue, narration, or descriptive text in the storyboard. |