Technical skills presentation notes

Over the whole semester for the technical skills, I've put all my focus into Stencyl. The first time I used Stencyl was last year during the second semester. At first I needed to get my head around but wasn't as brain imploding as Blender, which I now enjoy. The more time I spent on it, the more I enjoyed building a game from ground up. Not only did it get me to enjoy game development, but I started to appreciate coding.

In regards to technical skills, I didn't need to start from the beginning basics since I already got a grasp on navigating the programs interface. So I used the opportunity to work on the aspects of Stencyl I wasn't familiar with. These include Tileset creation, using collisions more effectively, creating custom event blocks, behaviors, attributes and giving more attention to the events editor.

I did run into issues regarding a Stencyl but I solved the problem and came out of it more wiser than before. For now on I will stick to blank games and start from scratch.

Another challenge I'll have is mathematics. This is a main skill needed in game development and has always been on of my weaknesses, but despite this I'm determined to stay devoted to game design.

Therefore I will keep on developing my Stencyl skills and move on to Stencyl 3 as this version has new features that I'm keen to try out. I aim to keep working on my skills while developing a game i can complete and publish on the app store.

Stencyl solution

Okay today I found a solution to getting the player character's HP to fall to 0 and die from enemy hits.

In the "Run and Jump" kits behaviour "Die in Pit", I added to actor collision event which allows the enemy to hit the player and decrease the health to 0. Next I set the players HP to 100 on the same behaviour in a separate event. The HP counter is a drawing event set in the scene 1 event editor and shows up on the screen.
Now the reason why the actor when die after the countdown expired is due to accidentally disabling the health management actor behaviour from the player. Also the countdown expiration event needs to be included in the Die in pit behavior to work like the death event. Without this behaviour, the custom event wouldn't work and trigger the behaviour. So now the actor is no longer immortal, but the one thing I still don't know is why this event had to be included in this behaviour. However right now I take this as a victory and good enough solution.

Stencyl issues.

Okay for a while now, the player character will not die from anything. This issue started to occur in a new scene I created using the run and jump kit. While this happened in scene 2, the opposite occurred in scene 1 which was the default scene in the template.
After creating behaviours and attributes to work around the problems, scene started getting the same problems as scene1.
Yesterday I got some help from our teacher Liam who found that applying the actor death even to an existing behaviour worked. Unfortunately when I made an actor behaviour focusing on actor death, the same issue occurred.
After some thinking, I came to the conclusion that maybe the template, run and jump kit itself was glitching especially when applying new behaviours. I could be wrong about it but my new solution is to start from scratch in a blank game. I've never had any problems with Milk Run, which I used the RPG town template kit for. The reason why is maybe the fact that the player actor wasn't made to die due to time restraints but I wouldn't mind testing this out to see if this template has the same issues.
Will update when problem is solved.