Knowledge is King.. lady Luck is queen...

On the Joker's Wild!!!

Now this is one I need to work on the eye-candy for... (so the screen shots you will see are bare bones), but this is one of those, where if you've read John's Rolling Road Background, you know the basic gist of the key to this being something different, as well as the cutting a hole in a shape to make it transparent.  (Which was a trick i learned from PowerPoint Spice in learning the motion path trick)

The difference is, that I went with motion paths instead of fly-in/fly-out... why?  Because it's easier to set up the animation for.



The Joker's Wild!

The rules are simple.. spin the wheels, stop the wheels, and whatever category you land on can be worth 50, 100, 200 or 500 points.    Single category:  50 points,  double :  100 points;  triple:  200 points;  3 jokers:  500 points.

Answer trivia question on an open channel (or with 3 players) score the points, and race to 500.


Wheels spinning...

So to do the motion path, it's literally an overlapping group of two strips of text boxes... when I kept testing this, after it'd get to the top of the group, it'd leave a big blank space before it would continue the loop of motion path.  I learned that unlike most other graphics when you did motion paths where you could go all the way through the second graphic set, I actually had to stop the motion path so the bottom of strip 1 actually started ON TOP of strip 2.

Otherwise, after it got to the top of strip 1 (since it rotates down), you'd get about a second or two of "black" emptiness before it would start up again.   Doing the overlap prevented the 'dead graphics spot'.


a 50 point question... cause you can't go off the board

The category reveal is actually a simple fly in, where you turn 6 of the categories visiblity off, and then just fly in the one remaining category and it looked like it dropped down like a standard slot machine.   The timing issue however, actually varies, because the VBA actually plays a sound like spinning slot machines before it will drop the three categories (It was a timing issue I had fixed at one time, but changed something in either my animations or VBA so it plays the sound before the animations), so sometimes all three drop at the same time, sometimes they drop in order, and sometimes they drop in random order (like wheel 3, wheel 1, then 2).

It actually adds to the randomness, although I'd love to fix my sound effects timing issue.

Then you reset the wheel, the category disappears and the motion path (which never actually stops, it's just behind everything, just starts showing again) until the next wheel stoppage.

As for the game rules:  Ehh.. lets' see, there's only 12 questions to a category, and if you blow through all 12, you just kinda treat it as a bonus "wild" spot.

Like i said, this is one of the next ones I want to improve with the eye-candy, but it's not a "high on my priority list" (although it should be), and maybe a scoreboard..

Not having seen The Joker's Wild before, I checked out a couple of clips on You Tube. The first thing that struck me was the similarity to the BANDIT game I posted a while ago. This one uses 'fly-in / fly-out' for the scrolling symbols (which are also constantly in motion like yours) with three invisible randomisers to drop down each static symbol in front of them 'on click' rather than being programmed.

Having looked at my screenshot tutorial for fly-in/fly-out again, I think the video tutorial is clearer.  You seem to have sorted your motion path method of continuous scrolling - so whatever works!