I took ActionScript this semester, and what you're seeing here is my final for that class.

It's the 21st Century, and even the zombie of today knows that an undead can be perfectly healthy without savagely murdering the living to feast upon their brains for sustenance. A good tofu-based brain substitute supplies all the protein one needs without the devouring of meaty brains-- delicious and nourishing though they may be! It is therefore your job to help the vegan zombie collect as many tofu-based brain substitutes as he can as they're hurled from the roof of the local Entire Foods supermarket. But be careful, a few regular, meaty brains have been thrown into the mix, be sure to avoid those.

DAMN I had fun making these. Admittedly, it required a lot of help from the instructor to get the brains and tofu-brains to calculate toward your score differently, and he came up with a better way to make them generate than what I had tried based on tutorials out of the textbook. And I couldn't figure out how to make the reset function work. But I don't think anyone in the class was able to do their final completely on their own-- we all had to get a fair bit of help. But it was still a lot of fun to design the sprites and the animation and it was very satisfying to play it. I kept finding myself playing over and over again with it in various stages of completion.

There were also a few things I had to consider from a gameplay perspective. Mainly, how fast should I make my objects fall and how many at a time, and how much of a penalty I should attach to catching the meaty brains. Even though as I was finishing up, I came up with a way to tighten the hit detection quite a bit (it was so simple I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't think of it sooner), I knew there would be many times when it would be unavoidable to catch the meaty brains, so I had to make a penalty that would discourage you from catching them unless you really couldn't avoid it, and I knew too stiff a penalty would just make it feel cheap. Basically, I have the numbers set up so that it's just enough that if you just run back and forth catching everything, yes, you'll avoid a game over, but you'll never run up any points.

There's a couple things I'd like to tweak in the future, but they're a bit beyond my current abilities. For example, I'd like to have the objects fall incrementally faster as more and more tofu brains are caught. I may try to add things like that in the future, but for now I'm very happy with I've got and I find it strangely addictive. ^_^