Losing and Winning

In the previous section we introduced the BSoD. This leads to the problem of what to do when the player loses the game. My first thought was to have the BSoD claw the player to death. This would reflect the feeling you get when you have an hours worth of unsaved work and the real blue screen of death shows up. Not that I’ve ever had that happen to me as I always save my work frequently. Mind you, the reason I always save my work frequently is because of learning what losing hours of work because of a computer crashing feels like.

Having someone being clawed to death is not really appropriate for a family friendly game so instead, I decided to have a bit of fun and generate a nice error message.

There is a button on the screen which returns the user to the title screen that we will be creating in the next section. To have the button do something we have a method in our Nightmare class for dealing with returning to the title screen. This method is called using nightmare.registerTitleButton(this.losecon_btn);

spelchan.Nightmare.prototype.registerTitleButton = function(btn) {
console.log("registering toTitle called! " + btn);
this.toTitleButton = btn;
this.toTitleHandler = this.toTitle.bind(this);
this.toTitleButton.addEventListener("click", this.toTitleHandler);
}

spelchan.Nightmare.prototype.toTitle = function(e) {
console.log("toTitle called!");
this.toTitleButton.removeEventListener("click", this.toTitleHandler);
this.stage.gotoAndPlay("Title");
}

This code simply sets up a button that is passed to it to call an event handler that simply returns the game to the title sequence.  To remove an event listener, however, you need a link to the event that is to be removed. Binding objects end up creating something new so to properly remove the event handler we need to keep a reference to the binded version of the handler. The actual handler code simply uses this binded reference to properly remove the event handling reference and then goes to the title sreen frame.

Now that it is possible to lose the game, perhaps it would be nice to allow the player to win the game. The winning scene was designed with two purposes in mind. First, as a distinct way of showing the player that they have completed the game. Second, to preview the next episode of the game. The number 666 has certain significance with my upbringing and to this day I still consider that number to be a bad omen. As you can't have that number on a clock, at least not legitimately, I opted for 6:36 for the time. The code for handling the “To be Continued...” button, as with the lose screen, is simply a call to nightmare.registerTitleButton(this.wincon\_btn);

Now we just need the title and intro screens and we are finished.These will be completed next fortnight which will conclude this chapter.