Day 7

Thread 4, Day 7 - Saturday, May 4, 2024

Agenda

Culminating Task: App Development Partnership
- This is your third working period to implement the plans you have made with your partner(s) at Lakefield DPS.
- Here are some additional videos Mr. Gordon has recorded to demonstrate a variety of ideas:
  - How to Move Screens from One Thunkable Project to Another
  - Custom Fonts, Sharing Scores Between Screens, and Backgrounds
  - Randomly Selecting Animations to Show, Sound Effects, and Images
  - How to Handle Sprite Sheets
    - Sometimes many tiny image assets come embedded in a single large image file. This video explains how to easily "slice up" a sprite sheet into many smaller individual image files in seconds.
    - Also learn how to quickly crop unwanted pixels to create a transparent background using Preview.
- Here are a couple of examples of using the Canvas component with stages and sprites.
  - Mr. Gordon is available to explain more about how these projects work to anyone who is interested:
    - Cloning Sprites (gems, trinkets)
    - Chicken Run (a small game)
- Here are several more sites with useful assets:
  - Custom TTF Fonts
  - Pixabay - Royalty Free Sound Effects
  - GameArtGuppy
    - This is the source of the fruit and food images! 😎
  - The Spriters Resource
    - Many retro video game assets.
- Here are sites useful for slicing up sprite sheets (see video above on this topic):
  - EZGif Sprite Sheet Cutter
    - This is useful when you know the size of individual frames.
    - For example, 32x32 pixels or 16x16.
  - Tools3ox Sprite Sheet Cutter
    - This site has an "automatic mode" for slicing up sprite sheets where each frame has a slightly different size.

Tip

This is not a must-do, but many websites sharing image assets are heavily littered with intrusive ads (and probably data trackers, too).

Consider installing an alternative browser that blocks ads and trackers by default; Vivaldi is one option Mr. Gordon has been using lately. It uses the same rendering engine as Chrome (so it will work with all the same sites) but it is much nicer to browse the web without intrusive ads.

Things to do before our next class

Make progress on implementation of your app idea.
- Be certain to briefly share an update on Notion, including screenshot(s) and a link to the current state of your project (if using Thunkable) or the .a3p file (if using Alice).