MiniGame9 - TAG

MiniGame9 - TAG - an attempt at VBA programming

The objective.
To beat the Best Ever score from game to game from file save to file load. In the game of TAG you try to TAG (click) the Tile which will jump away from you in a random direction in an effort not to get TAGGED. The only way to TAG it is to slowly move your cursor towards one of the corners and the moment the cursor arrow changes to a pointing finger click away at the Tile for as long as you have the pointing finger. Multi-TAGS give you the most points: the more TAGS in a sequence the higher (geometrically) your score will be.

How to score even higher. 
1. Every so often a red laser dot will show up for a short period of time indicating - where to next - the Tile will jump. Use it to your advantage with a Multi-TAG in mind. 
2. Additionally, the SHOW option can invoke the laser dot as often as needed for as long as the game score doesn't pass 2000 points. Afterwards this option becomes unavailable.
3. You can also earn Extended Play with a Multi-TAG of 8 or more consecutive TAGS in a sequence. A window then pops up where you can choose to continue from screen center. Very advantageous especially when the Tile is close to the screen edge or partially out. Not good to center the Tile if it's already close to screen center and you're currently on a Multi-TAG spree.

NEW Game
Resets your current Score preserving High score and Best Ever score. Use it as often as you like, especially when the Tile goes off screen, or you:
- see no future in this particular game and want to start a new one
- want to try out this functionality
- get bored.

SHOW
Shows (or hides if clicked again) the laser dot.

QUIT & Exit
Use it instead of the ESCape key to end games. It removes unwanted slides, saves scores and gets everything in order for when you will load the file next time.

RESET
Resets all scores, particularly the BEST Ever score. Once used, you start at the very beginning with a 0-0-0 score. 

HELP
Shows at any time a help screen with this reminder of how to play the game. Clicking the help screen hides it.

The Tile
Displayed on it is the number of moves made in a particular game.

*Final notes*
The look & feel is aimed to be like an action game. That explains the sounds and color graphics. You might want to turn down your volume...
Might not work properly - it's a first, so try not to demolish me entirely with criticism but make me aware of what's wrong
johnr - the counters work on their own in real time!
rusnak - thanks for helping me with the timer


Watch the video how it could be played


You can download the file from here.

EDIT: The game layout has changed as to the one in the video but the gameplay itself remains the same

I played this yesterday, the gameplay is absolute fire by Powerpoint standard. And despite the game's system being made in such a way that it can only progress when the players hovered the mouse, I found myself unable to stop playing until "It" manages to hide beyond the screen by some mysterious element of entropy. And if I was particularly lucky/unlucky, it will stay on the visible area and I will keep playing until my hand got cramps.

The tutorial section definitely has a lot of room for improvements (gotta make it less... text wall-y), the UI's button design too. But the combo-sprite visual effect that flashes in the background, it is spot-on already, very spectacular I must say. The only thing that irks me would be that combo-sprite colored red, it stands out like a sore-thumb for not fitting with the rest of the combo-sprite's design.

But overall, I never thought there would come a day where I played a fast-paced powerpoint game that doesn't involve mazes.
10.5/10 for innovation
9/10 for the combo-sprites if not for that red thing, so 6/10

*I'm not a professional game developer and I'm not really sure what I'm actually talking about

I'm happy too not to have made yet another PowerPoint maze game! Can you suggest the Best Ever RGB colour? As for the tutorial - I'm simply too lazy. It's a 1 slide game by the way. The template duplicates itself for the game and then deletes the extra slide on new, reset and quit.

I can't suggest a color palette, but I believe there is a site for that already.

VBA is magical, almost cheating. I'm having mixed feelings, but oh well, at least I had fun.

Edit: the way you stylized the normal combo sprites with glow-effect and black colored text, I prefer you do that for all of them. Tweak the colors accordingly to distinctly differentiate the red one and the blue ones. That should work Imo, I think...

This took me a while to get the hang of. At first I thought the point was to sneak up to the shape and then click it as fast as you touched it, so I was moving really slow. After reading Hypela's "fast paced"comment, it then dawned on me I was playing too careful and didn't quite get it. I also really like the text glow with each tag, it looks really sharp within this minimalist style. I would love to see the rest of your UI to focus on this style. Perhaps, you could have all your buttons at the top in a row and then have a large rectangle with border take up the rest of the screen as your visible playing field.

I'm wondering if you copy/pasted the slide so that you can reset the square in the middle? If so, you can give the square absolute coordinates. I'm assuming you're using relative coordinates for the movement (where the shape is +/- X amount of distance.) The .Top and .Left are numbers based off how far the shape's reference point is from the slide origin, which is at the top left corner. The numbers used to define the shape's top/left coordinates are in points, so you'll have to convert from what you would see in your shape properties tab. I see inches used for top/left position up to 2 decimal places. There are several free conversion calculators out there you can use to plug in your values you see and get the points value for you to use in your code. 1 inch = 72 points by the way.

Speaking of your square's position as it sometimes likes to wander off the screen, there is a way to fix this. You can add a couple of conditional If/then's to check the position of the square's future move. You can check if the future move's .Left < 0 or .Top < 0 then have it redo that bit of code until it randomly finds a new future spot that won't go off screen. You'll have to get the values of the right-most value for Left, and bottom-most value for Top. It will look something like this:

Code:

Sub FutureMove()
Dim shp as shape
Set shp = 'Your square

RedoMove: 'This will be where the code goes back to if your future move's shape falls outside of the boundaries you have set below.

'Your existing code, generates your shape's future move.

If shp.Top < 0 then Goto RedoMove
If shp.Left < 0 then Goto RedoMove
If shp.Top > 1000 then Goto RedoMove 'I just used 1000 as an example, you'll have to determine what your boundary is
If shp.Left > 1000 then Goto RedoMove 'I just used 1000 as an example, you'll have to determine what your boundary is

End Sub

Overall, it's a pretty cool new game experience not seen in PowerPoint. Well done for your first game with VBA!

Thanks Mike,

I hear what you're saying. I will use your advice for my next game I write about below. In TAG I use .incrementLeft and .incrementTop to move the Tile without having to calculate pixels (or control the size of Tile for that matter). At one point the Tile has to go off screen or the game will never end. I duplicate the template slide 1 for each new game to center the Tile and to manage the counters with CInt() and then delete slide 2 on NewGame, Quit&Exit and Reset.

Both you and Hypela have voiced for a GUI change so that's what I'll try to fix for the moment.

The success with getting TAG actually working has got me encouraged to try to write my version of a PowerPoint Pacman. I've got already the 4 buggers moving around the screen and Pacman controlled by the player with a 4-directional click pad. I am heavily challenged now by my own approach for the board setup using multidimensional arrays (21, 21) which would keep A). properties of the board building blocks to interact with and B). current positions of game pieces. I have a bad feeling about having to dive into serious learning, maybe Excel spreadsheets coupled with PowerPoint, and then breaking my neck trying to go down that path - too much knowledge, too little determination.

Here is the pinnacle of my creative capabilties combining both your requests:
- menu items and scores in 1 line 
- menu items changed look
- highlighted play area 
- Best Ever red color removed

Download TAG v.2

I can't surpass this graphical stroke of genius of mine

Nice graphical updates! Looking very clean and professional

As for the square still leaving the playing field whenever it feels like, I think you could go about this differently. Instead of having the square randomly decide to end the game for you, what if you have the game end when the square has made 100 moves? You have a counting mechanism already that tracks each move, you can use that to tell it to trigger a game over message and end the game when it hits 100 or whatever number you decide. This way, the player will know how long they have left and try to get their best score. All scores will be based off the same '100 moves only' constant, rather than at random when the square decides to quit. You'll also have to put in those boundaries that I mentioned earlier to make sure the square doesn't leave the playing field before the game ends.

Other than that, this is really turning out to be a pretty cool new game. Nice work Jarek!

A great game - but I'm useless at it unless a score of -820 is good. It was just too quick for me. As soon as my cursor was moved the square had moved somewhere else. Lots of clicking and missing just boosted up my minus score! Oh well. I obviously need more practice!

John,
It doesn't have to be a fast paced game. Move your cursor carefully towards one of the corners and if lucky the Tile will jump in a way that your cursor will change to a finger pointing at a Tile corner. Don't move the cursor but only click it to get a TAG and a satisfying explosion sound. If more lucky after the first TAG and Tile jump, your cursor will remain a finger still pointing at a Tile corner, so click again for a Multi-TAG all the while holding the cursor steady in the same place. Continue until the Tile jumps away for you to lose contact with it completely - that's when you try to repeat the afore mentioned procedure. Look at my video - I'm not really moving my cursor all over the place and the first 6 TAGS in a row at the beginning of the video are done with my cursor steady in one place; it just seems to be a fast paced game with the sounds and flashes. Always go for the Tile corner and not the Tile side.

Tell me you did it!

Mike,
I got the delimiters for screen edges working - the Tile doesn't go off screen. And although I can make the game to end after your proposed 100 moves, I was thinking that maybe instead I could implement a time limit of 30 seconds for a game. This would add a little adrenalin to the game play with the necessity to act faster for a better score (poor John!). Additionally, I could rewrite the Extended Play for a Muli-TAG of 8 or more TAGS to add +10 seconds to the time limit each time.

Problem
Whatever I do I can't get the second timer to neither run nor show seconds remaining to game end. Nothing I try works. Can it be that 2 timers simply can't work simultaneously in PowerPoint?

Jarek wrote:Tell me you did it!

I did it!

Not a brilliant score but a high of 420, and with 7 consecutive tags at one point.

Great show John!
7 consecutive TAGS is an excellent spree you were on and didn't twitch your finger - just pounded that Tile to kingdom come with no mercy! That's the way to go - remain cool and collected and determined to always go for the corner nearest your cursor even if the Tile keeps on jumping away. It's just a question of time when he'll be yours again . When the red laser dot lights up you know where it's going to jump so go for one of the corners closest to the dot.

I am proud of you.

    

These two are my favorite duo in PPC