1) Chapter 3 of The Game Maker's Apprentice: Galactic Mail. In it, you pilot a slow-turning ship through a starfield to deliver mail to planets, avoiding asteroids along the way. The book encourages you to make the ship pilot like molasses, for some reason; the game is very difficult to beat unless you jump directly from planet to planet, abusing one of the central mechanics. Even so, it taught me how to use named variables to sort out movement parameters, and how to use multi-layered .gifs to create dynamic sprites -- both useful skills I intend to exploit in the future.
2) Chapter 4 of the Game Maker's Apprentice: Lazarus! Despite its somewhat cool-sounding name, it's a stupid game about stacking falling crates. However, it taught me one important thing: when creating a character, you can easily make him/her a series of connected objects that only appear under certain circumstances and, if the transition is seamless, no one will be the wiser! When I read this, a supernova of ideas went off in my head, which are all saved on a Google Document to which only I have the working link. ;3
3) All this work has made me decide to mess with Photoshop to create a series of sprites for that Dream Tower demo level, the concept art of which I uploaded to my Picasa a while ago. This is all the work I've done so far: Fritz standing/running, and four ground sprites to simulate perfect diagonal surfaces. I haven't gotten to animating or programming any mechanics for these, though -- I still have quite a few chapters to go before I stand a chance of having it control how I want. Still, this was fun! I hope I get some more time to continue this work in the near future.
4) I started messing around in Scratch at home! I came up with a few ideas for making this into something you'd call a "game" -- I'm rather proud of them, actually -- but there are a couple of things I need to figure out first. Still, exciting! (the sprites are mine, of course)
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