Richmond eats Escargots

[richmond62]

Well, personally I would not recommend them; extremely disappointing: and certainly not part of a 'sattvic' diet.

HOWEVER, a while back a 'small blob' who was attending my ESF school turned up early and was singing the praises of some daft game (or series of games) called Snail Bob:

https://www.1001games.com/puzzle/snail-bob
-

SB1.jpg (90.7 KiB) Viewed 2831 times

-

SB3.jpg (108.15 KiB) Viewed 2831 times

-
This made me moderately sick (especially the horrible, repetitive music); and I remember trying to point out to a 9 year old that "that sort of thing" did not appeal to 'mature' types like me.

Later it occurred to me that while I did not like Snail Bob as such, the game had potential as something to 'clone' in xTalk as a programming exercise.

[richmond62]

SBfunctions.jpg (107.38 KiB) Viewed 2827 times

-
If we perform what people who like to dream up jargon might call a 'functional analysis' of scene #1 of the game it can be broken down into essential components:

1. The snail (which is animated) that moves forward.

1.1. Preferably there should be a START button which should start the snail animation.

1.2. Preferably clicking on the snail when it is moving should stop it moving, and when it is not moving a click should start it moving.

2. A 'pipe' from which the snail emerges.

2.1. A 'pipe' into which the snail disappears having completed the scene.

3. A toggle switch that raises and lowers a log on a chain.

4. Some sort of lift/elevator toggled by a button.

For reasons of simplification I am not bothering about a score.

[richmond62]

MOTION1.png (186.83 KiB) Viewed 2799 times

-

MOTION2.png (189.12 KiB) Viewed 2799 times

-
I have just popped in a button so you can see all the image resources stored out of sight at the bottom of the stack:
-

MOTION3.jpg (141.19 KiB) Viewed 2788 times

[richmond62]

Here is that stack:

Click on the RUN button to make the snail move.

Click on the snail when it is moving to make it stop.

Click on the snail when it is not moving to make it move.

Look at the field that sometimes contains an 'x'.

[tperry2x]

Oh, I think I got the wrong idea - I thought you meant you'd made a platformer (2D-controller) with this character, using the keyboard to control it. No problem. Was only trying to avoid duplicated effort.

[richmond62]

It is perfectly possible to replace those mouse-clicks with keys: and Snail Bob is a 2D game that in its origianl conception is both key controlled and mouse-clicked:
-

SB3.jpg (108.15 KiB) Viewed 2762 times

-
The snail's movement is key-controlled, while the 2 things ringed with those white broken-line circles are activate with mouse-clicks.

If you think that would be OK: let one of your children have 15 minutes on the original game: and watch them.

[tperry2x]

Ah, okay - got you.
I see what you mean, it's mostly a point and click kind of thing but can use keys too.
However, the original (as far as I can make out, here) allows me to click on things once the snail is moving.

On the stack version, you can't click anything while the snail is in motion as it's just a continuous loop.

snail.gif (1.21 MiB) Viewed 2730 times

[richmond62]

From a pedagogical point of view reinventing the wheel is going a bit far: but copying the functionality of a computer game/program is a useful learning process.

As one has NO access to either the underlying code of something one is copying, NOR access to whatever was going on in the minds of the original designers one has to come up with one's own (possibly original) ways to achieve the same thing.

While copying a picture might be fairly trivial, copying the functionality of what is to all effects and purposes a locked box is far from trivial.