I’m still working on the new onion story, trying to come up with some new interesting backgrounds – right now, I’m playing with poster ideas, using various sketch software on the iPad to try and come up with something.  Hell, I even played with 123D Sculpt to try and make a 3D onion…. that’s not coming out as well as I had hoped.  If only I could just sculpt him in real clay, then scan him in.  Because, you know, I have access to all that kind of equipment … or even clay. For now, here he is, squashing a flower.

One thing that keeps coming up (thanks in part to Theresa bringing it up on occasion) is, what other kinds of rude things will the evil onion do.  She wants him giving the finger.  What finger?  Do I have to give him arms first?!  Will he need legs too?  Will he end up looking like Chairface Chippendale, except an onion and not a chair?  This is a slippery slope, innit?

Still, today is the first night of class, and I’m going to see where this new batch takes me. Teaching is always an odd thing to me, since I’m working off topics that are very familiar to me, I don’t really feel like I’m teaching as much as I’m just explaining the obvious (yes, I know, obvious to me), but I generally feel that this stuff should be fairly easy to pick up once they give it a chance, and I should be there to just elaborate on the simplicity (or complexity) of the general ideas.

This is my second quarter teaching Flash, and I think it’s going to help me get to the ball rolling faster on the onion.  I think I’ll be taking the iPad and sketching during lab time a lot this quarter.

That’s today’s lesson in class. I’ve shown animation, shape and motion tweening. I’ve shown how to use timeline code to control different movie clips. Last week I introduced code logic and variables. Today I told them to, well, basically draw.

All those bits up there are for moving things around, getting user interactivity working, but that’s no good if you can’t come up with something for it to do. For the final project, they have to come up with an interactive something. A something that uses if/else, buttons, etc. Still, before they can get to the if/else, before they can make a button do something, they have to plot out what those somethings are.

So tonight we discussed final projects. Most chose to do a flavor of the following:

1. A match tile game
2. A system map showing moving trains and possible collisions!
3. A weather plotting animation – button clicks will determine how a “day” will progress
4. A phone interface with video chat faked
5. A she’ll game with bets and score keeping

Quite a few started worrying about the code, but seriously, that can come later. First do the fun stuff, draw out storyboards, figure out animations, deal with the coding later.

Once all the little bits that make the animation cool are ready, then settle in to the coding part. It’s like cooking, get all the necessary ingredients, mix the right bits together THEN worry about what goes in the oven and what goes in the saucepan.

Stupid weather.  Barely 3 inches of snow, and none happened till much later!  Still, when you’re teaching at night and you see a giant blue blob of snow on the radar map, well, you cut everyone out early. Still, I battled on for over 2 hours, so they could try their hand at some simple comparisons complete with score keeping!

Check it out here

It’s fairly simple, and runs on 57 lines of code (49 if you don’t count empty lines)!  And some of those lines weren’t actually used (set-up for some extra stuff we never got to). In this, I tried to show how variables interact and change based on conditions set.  The values of money above each character’s head changes based on variables set based on which face gets clicked on.

Then the faces change based on a comparison of the money amounts.  So every time a face gets clicked, the money amounts change and are checked.  If Bob’s got more money, he gets all smug.  When Bob has less, he gets mad.

It’s all taken care of in a bitty function called checkForJerk.

function checkForJerk():void
{
if (bobsMoney > myMoney)
{
me.gotoAndStop(2);
bob.gotoAndStop(2);
}
else if (myMoney > bobsMoney)
{
me.gotoAndStop(1);
bob.gotoAndStop(3);
}
else
{
me.gotoAndStop(1);
bob.gotoAndStop(1);
}
}

I’m sure this could have been done easier with a switch/case format, but let’s get through the basics first, shall we?

Oh, and in case you didn’t notice, yes, I appropriated little troll faces for fun – no idea who made them, but if I knew, I’d give credit where it’s due.

So the dreaded if/else statement was the topic du jour. I spent the entire evening writing on the whiteboard. No computer, no “start-up Flash and do what I say.” Well, I told them, “open up NotePad and type this in.” Some felt I meant a literal notepad and wrote only in the notebooks, even after I said, “you’re turning this in.” I have a few cellphone snapshots of people’s work, and I have to say, my eyes hurt, just a little, from fighting the urge to roll them up through all this.

So, sunshine and if/else. How else can you start explaining the concept, really? Most folks (I’m not part of “most folks” in this case) don’t think in terms of programming logic much. At least they don’t recognize it as such. I don’t usually either, but I have wondered, as I wait at a frozen bus stop in February, “if I hadn’t ducked into a Tower Records during a rainstorm in Santa Barbara back in 1994, would have ended up in Chicago in 2013?” The answer to that is probably “no.” That’s another story and I digress.

Simply put, choices we make based on variables in our lives are just like programming. Each leads to new choices and new paths to go down. Which makes <insert deity here> a snarky coder with chip stains on <his/her’s/its> D&D t-shirt. Or at best, we’re all living out the longest and oddest Choose Your Own Adventures books ever written:

If you want more coffee before your 11am meeting, turn to page 1173, if you think you can keep the yawning to a minimum, turn to page 1554.

Where was I? Oh yeah – if it’s sunny out, go to the beach, but if your boss sees you, don’t go to the beach:

var sunny:Boolean = true;
var boss:Boolean = false;
var beach:Boolean = false;

if ((sunny) && (!boss))
{
     beach = true;
}
else
{
     beach = false;
}

This took the better part of an hour to go through. I think by the end most were getting it – in the broadest terms. Next class, we’ll try and apply it to something more tangible than weather.