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FEATURE
Dropwords, Part 2
Developing a simple game
Issue: 8.4 (May/June 2010)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 54,925
Starting Page Number: 18
Article Number: 8410
Resource File(s):
8410.zip Updated: 2010-05-03 18:55:28
Related Link(s): None
Excerpt of article text...
In the last issue I started a tutorial of how to build a fun word game called Dropwords. We got about halfway through it so now we'll finish it.
Animation
Let's begin by adding some animation and actually making the dropping letters drop. Now there are many ways to do animation -- how you handle it depends on a great deal on the specific needs of your application. For instance, a 3D action game is going to have very different animation needs than a word processor. In the case of Dropwords, it's a simple board game and its animation needs are minimal. Therefore I decided to go with a basic approach using a
Timer
to animate a letter tile. For a number of reasons this isn't the best technique for an action game (for one, Timers aren't guaranteed to trigger reliably and animation can be jerky), but it works fine for our needs.
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