"Space Decoder" game question

JadeJohnsonGames wrote:Alright, cool!

Okay.  So there's this one SlideShowGame called "Space Decoder", from this one site at:

people.uncw.edu/ertzbergerj/MS_PowerPoint_Games/Space_Decoder/Space-Decoder-v3.ppt

.  In it, there's a minigame in which you have to shoot all the spaceships with your mouse before time runs out; and you actually have to shoot, ALL, of them, or you "die", or at least fail your objective.

What I'd like to know is, "How did they make it so that you couldn't advance to the next set of questions unless you landed a hit on each and every ship?"

I know that it's not just one spaceship that triggers the clearing of the level, because I tried clearing them in different orders, and no matter which one was the last one flying, it ALWAYS took you to the next quiz.

I do have one theory, and it goes like this:

1. The developer put the ships into the game engine, then covered each one with as many invisible disappearing triggers as the total number of ships in the current stage, being sure to have individually selected one ship and all of its accompanying layers at a time and then giving them all a global yet pod specific motion path that was unique from that of each of the others and its own dematerializing imperceptible triggers. 

2. They then set each trigger to make all of the other triggers in its same layer disappear, resulting in the uncovering of the next layer of triggers. 

3. As it appears that each ship is taken out by the player, what is actually happening is the removal of the ship, along with all of the trigger layers over it, and the subtraction of one layer over all the remaining ships as the total number of spacecraft is subtracted from by one until there are no more layers. 

4. The spaceship objects themselves would thusly serve as their own triggers that would then cause the 'stage complete' (or whatever it says) message to appear as a screen filling object over the whole slide once whichever pod was left was clicked, since there is nothing left to have been animated in the actual level. 

4B. Either that, or each actual ship instead serves as a hyperlink to that particular stage's 'level cleared' slide, since, either way, there would be no more vanishing triggers to cause the final vessel not to disappear on click of itself.

What do you think though?  Is my theory correct?  If so, which variant of part four looks most like it was the one that was actually implemented into UncwEdGames's "Space Decoder" game engine?

Thanks, and I look forward to your answer!

JadeJohnsonGames wrote:Well actually, if I remember correctly, the continue button does NOT appear until all the ships are gone.  So it might be that when all of them have been removed, the result of clicking on the final one may be that there is a separate slide with an empty stage in it, and that each actual spacecraft object is in fact a hyperlink to said "continuE" slide, which would thusly have a "Fade Smoothly" transition applied to it.  Thank you!  That really helped!