Night@TheMuseum
An attempt to summarize what Justin Quach had done while at N@tM at Del Norte High School
What is Night At The Museum?
Night at the museum is an event held by Del Norte High School, where people from their artistic classes get to show off the work they have done for their art classes to everyone at the school and anyone visiting.
What Did You Do? How was it?
My class of 22 people worked together to make a singular game based off the hit Nintendo Game Mario. We were all split into groups of 4 or 5 and worked together to design a singular aspect of the game. I was assigned to a group with Timur, Xavier, Daniel, and Abigail. The “main” group left Nathan in charge of us and we were told to work on the enemies, coins, and platforms. This was a long and arduous process of testing. In the end we split up the assignments into further segments among the five of us. I let everyone else choose first because I was fine with working on anything. I was left with working on the platforms and was quite happy with this due to the fact that I was not a fan of the old platforms and their design.
One of the first things I added to the platform was the ability to choose it’s y-coordinate. Since having differing heights for each platform sounded interesting and would allow for more design choices with the platforms. In order to do this I used the idea of my groupmate Xavier in order to add a xPercentage and a yPercentage which lets you input a percentage for the GameSetup.js file. This allowed for custom positioning of the block which allowed for much, much more level customization and even the creation of walls!
Look at the end of each line, there is a xPercentage and yPercentage which chooses the location of each item, using a percentage of the viewport.
The rest of my team worked on a lucky block, a Goomba, coins, and bouncing off of goombas. In the end we finished everything and merged together with the rest of the groups which caused issues of their own. After successfully merging each part, barely in time for N@tM (Night at the Museum) we got ready to showcase and play the game which can be found here, if that doesn’t work try the one on this repo. We then divided up the times we would show up so that people would be able to see the game the whole event. After which we would also have time to look and around and participate in some of the events.
How did it go? What did you see?
I chose to go at around 6:30 PM, along with most of my group, another group I had worked closely with, the scoring team, also chose to go at that time. I had stayed at school until the event started and looked around at the things before that. During the showcasing of our game my groups parents came and looked at what we did. Such as Daniel’s dad and Nora’s (A freshman in the scoring/leaderboard team) parents. During which Mr. Mortensen (Our teacher) came and brought his wife and kid to look at our game. Many people’s friends also came over and looked at our game, with many comments, both negative and positive. It was an enjoyable experience and we got a lot of helpful criticisms from people, such as the uncomfortable feelings of the controls and the jumping being strange due to it not being a parabola formatting.
When our thing was done I looked around for a little longer but as many people were leaving I decided to go, however one that stuck in my mind was done by my friend in Computer Science Principles, Bella, she had made a site which would help you track your daily fitness goals based off your weight and etc.
![Image of Bella's blog](/csse-er/images/blogs/bella1.png)
![Second image of Bella's website](/csse-er/images/blogs/bella2.png)
Overall/Reflection
Looking back over the entire course of the trimester inside Computer Science Software Engineering, I greatly enjoyed. I got to meet people I might’ve never met without this class and also made some good friends. We managed to work together to program a game, even if half-baked, in an actual programming language! If you told me that I would be able to do this just a year ago I never would have believed you, maybe on Scratch, but with JavaScript and VSCode? Never. Seeing all of that culminate in the N@tM project was truly eye opening and honeslty extremely relieving since the class was a lot of work.