Summary This hour demonstrated an interesting feature of
Summary This hour demonstrated an interesting feature of many commercial games that you now know how to add to your own games. I’m referring to demo mode, which allows a game to present to the game player a glimpse of how the game plays. Demo mode was a critical feature in arcade games, where a game needed to sell itself in order to convince someone to spend a quarter on a play. Computer games don’t rely as heavily on demo mode because they don’t live on quarters, but it’s nonetheless an important touch on a game that might otherwise do nothing in between plays. The next hour wraps up the book by showing you one last game feature that we’ve all grown to love: the high score list. The high score list is an important part of most classic video games because it provided a means of measuring your skill at a game and saving it for others to see. Q&A Q1: Why does the Space Out 3 game combine demo mode with the splash screen image? A1: Displaying the splash screen image as part of demo mode in the Space Out 3 game has more to do with efficiency than anything else. The game is fairly simple, and it just doesn’t seem necessary to complicate things with a bunch of different screens. The aliens moving around behind the splash screen image are sufficient to demonstrate how the game plays, which is the ultimate goal of creating demo mode. I view the solution as killing two birds with one stone! Q2: Does it make sense to create a multi-screen demo mode? A2: Yes. If a game is interesting enough to warrant more than one screen of demo mode, it’s a great idea. For example, a game with multiple levels that have different backgrounds and characters would benefit greatly from several different screens in demo mode. You could accomplish this by starting a new game as you move between each demo mode screen. You aren’t really starting a new game, but you’re placing the code in the NewGame() function and using it to clear the sprite list and add new sprites for each different screen. You’ll learn quickly that demo mode can be as simple or as complex as you choose to make it. Workshop The Workshop is designed to help you anticipate possible questions, review what you’ve learned, and begin learning how to put your knowledge into practice. The answers to the quiz can be found in Appendix A, “Quiz Answers.” Quiz 1: What’s the difference between demo mode and a splash screen? 2: What’s the purpose of the _iGameOverDelay global variable in the Space Out 3 game? 3: If the _iGameOverDelay global variable is set to 300, how much time does it end up causing for the delay?
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