This is a mini-game developed for the U.S. Army to train soldiers on Swahili names of native African animals. This game was built in Actionscript and has 3 phases. The first phase allows the user to learn about the habitat of the animals, while at the same time a custom-built pre-loader is working in the background to load in assets for the game. The second phase teaches the user about the names of the animals in Swahili and English. In the third, and last, phase the user starts playing the game to memorize the animal names.
The game is based on Pokemon Snap, in which the user uses a camera to capture images of different creatures. In this case the user is on a safari trip where they must take pictures of African animals. However, they must capture only the list of animals that are given to them in the correct order and they have only a limited amount of incorrect tries before their camera runs out of batteries.
The game background and foreground is built in 4 layers, with each of the layers being long strips of bitmap images with transparency. They are designed to loop, so I had to work closely with the graphic designer to produce non-visible seems on the beginning and end of those strips. Each strip scrolls across the screen at different speeds to produce the effect of traveling in the jeep.
The jeep itself was built in 3 pieces: the body, front tire and rear tire. This allows for the rotation of the tires animation, but at the same time allows me to simulate a suspension system for the jeep as well.
All the animals are randomly placed within a range on both the x and y axis within the scene of the background, with the exception of a gazelle that is drinking water as this is not an interactive element in the game. The user must click on an animal with the camera icon that is acting as the mouse to be able to enter into a camera viewfinder mode.
The viewfinder mode was performed by generating a high resolution image sample of the background, foreground and animal layer situation for that moment in time. Then that sample was compressed into one layer and zoomed into the viewfinder. You can still see some of the flaws of a corner of this sample being visible during the animation into the viewfinder.
Once in the viewfinder mode, the image is blurry and the user must align the circle animation with the middle of the viewfinder lens to take a clear picture. This was a more difficult challenge before the final result that you see here as the original design called for 2 animation circles that the user must align to center both vertically and horizontally. As many of the testers had difficulty in completing this task, we removed 1 circle and slowed down the animation as well.
When the user has collected all the animals in their list, then the game is complete. The list of animals to capture is randomly generated at the start of every game. and kept track of via an array. This is the same for the battery life of the user’s camera with represents the user’s incorrect answers.