Back to the British games... How good of a thief are you?

And can you pull off... THE BANK JOB

In terms of my VBA writing, this one actually took a lot more to put together than I thought it would.  And I LIKE to think this is one of those that is extremely loyal to the game itself.    Round 1 was incredibly easy to put together.

However, due to using a stop/startable timer being pretty much an impossibility, (yes, I know you can.. it's just UGLY the only way it can be done), this is one of those games where a timer is kept off-screen, and it's set for 2 minutes.



You start off by clicking the "fill the vault" button.     It then puts random amounts of "money" in each of 25 safety deposit boxes.   It then empties out 4 of those boxes and replaces them with 0 "dollars/euros".. (hey I'm equal opportunity here *grin*).    It will then total the money in all 25 of the boxes and put the grand total of possible points in the display at the top of the screen.

You then put your four "theives" names in the name row, and you blank out the money they've stolen thus far.  (Pretty much screen 1)

Then you hit the "Next Q" button, and start the timer.    Timer runs until either 10 seconds pass or someone answers the question.   If no one answers the question in 10 seconds, you reveal the "next Q", and the timer keeps running (so it's about 12 seconds per question if you can read a question in 2 seconds).

If a player successfully answers the question, the timer stops, and the player who gave the correct answer gets to choose one of the safety deposit boxes, and whatever amount is in there, they add to their score by clicking Case 1 square under their name.   In addition, the total is removed from the big tote board (so if you score 4500 in a safety deposit box, 4500 points are removed from the remaining points)

They then have the choice of continuing to play the round, or leave the vault.  why would you leave the vault?   Because of the timer hits zero and you haven't left the vault with one of the three largest amounts of money for the round, you're eliminated...



Round 1 continues with the 2 minute timer continuing to run on the next question... with the timer being paused on every correct question

Listy needs some luck to try to force Tim's hand to make him stay in the vault longer than he needs to... two 0 safety deposit boxes put him in a hole.



Then we go to Round 2:     In this round, same thing applies, except you have to put money in case 2.. the question is _how much money_?     The 2 minutes still apply, but this time if you open a safety deposit box, you can "discard" the amount you open, if you haven't put anything in case 2.   Why would you discard though?   Because once you put an amount in Case 2, that case is locked immediately... and all remaining money you draw goes into Case 1.     But you have to have money in BOTH cases to leave the vault!


Game play continues as per Round 1, you can leave the vault after any correct question if you wish, or you can push your luck and try to get more.

Rusnak has a decision.. take the 11,500 and lock it in case 2, or hope for a bigger amount?



Round 2 keeps going for the same principle.. and once you click the locked total square, it sums up your winnings and you're out of the Round...

Poor me..  A "0" deposit box dooms me to never catching up in 2 minutes



So why the "largest bundle" box?   That's where round 3 comes in... again, there's a STEAL, as well as a BANKRUPT.   Bankrupt is specifically what it says.. any money you put away , you LOSE.. it's gone, discard, lost forever.    But if you get the STEAL slot, you get to take the LARGEST bundle of your opponent (the largest single deposit box they opened).   The system only keeps track of your top 10 bundles, but that's more than enough for this game.

But the 2 minute warning is still in play, and you still have to get out of the vault with the most money of the round...

You win round 3, you win the game and you pulled off the caper of the century in THE BANK JOB!



The reason I love this Powerpoint presentation is that it's VERY true to the original game show (much like Countdown)..   It took me forever to get the "biggest bundles" and the '2nd case' portions to work, but they add so much to this... particularly if you're hoping for a large bundle to lock away in Round 2 early, considering you've got to lock both cases to leave the vault that round.

But when they see that timer getting down to the last 15 seconds or so, you'd be surprised how fast even normally slower players can answer questions


If PPT had a better way to do a timer you could stop/start without resetting or changing slides, I'd add it in, but with VBA and animations it can't be done... once you start a timer on a single slide, you pretty much have to let them run.   I've do have games that have countdown timers on them, but those ones, the timer never stops running... (and no, the Pause Powerpoint show doesn't count, because I still need to do stuff on a slide show and a pause of the slideshow makes that impossible).

And this is one of those games, where I learned that "if .. then .. for... next... else.. for .. next... end if" function sequences are NOT Visual basic friendly in any way shape or form... did you know (and I can't remember which) that either "if .. for.. end if" or  "for.. if/end if.. next" can break a Visual basic compiler..  it simply cannot calculate one of those sequences, cause when it hits either the END or the NEXT, it assumes you're ending the for AND the if among other bugs.

I like the little lego guy!

Just saw an episode on youtube, very interesting. This feels like a more strategic version of Deal or No Deal with trivia questions.

Interesting tidbit about the VBA; I'll have to check to see if that could be the cause of some of my issues. Thanks for sharing!

I cant remember right off my work around on the if/for stuff rusnak... I think i had to use a lot of SELECT statements to solve some issues on this one