Video Poker, Part 2

Selecting the Cards

Now the player is in a position to select cards to use. We need a way of letting the player know that the card is selected which is why we have the draw movies. This movie is a single frame movie which contains the word “DRAW” in bold red letters. It is placed over each of the cards and is set to be hidden until made visible. These movie clips were placed in the “Info” layer on the first frame and, if you recall, were hidden in the game initialization method. The movie clips are labeled, “draw1_movie,” “draw2_movie,” “draw3_movie,” “draw4_movie,” and “draw5_movie.”

The logic to handle selecting and unselecting code was already written above but before the game can actually let the player select or unselect a card the game needs to tell the program that selections are allowed. We also need a way for the player to tell the game that it is finished selecting cards so the game can continue. This is the select button on the bottom right of the screen which we add in frame 50 and name “draw\_btn”.  On frame 50 we tell the global video poker game class to activate card selection and the select button using the following two lines of code.

this.stop();
videoPokerGame.activateSelectButton();

The activateSelectButton method is a function that we need to write in the global script. It simply sets the global variable “selecting” to true and then activates the draw button to enable the player to start the game. Clicking on the draw button calls a handleSelect event which simply removes the listener from the button and continues playing the video poker movie.

VideoPokerGame.prototype.activateSelectButton = function()
{
this.selecting = true;
this.drawHandler = this.handleSelect.bind(this);
this.vpMovie.draw_btn.addEventListener("click", this.drawHandler);
}
VideoPokerGame.prototype.handleSelect = function()
{
this.selecting = false;
this.vpMovie.draw_btn.removeEventListener("click", this.drawHandler);
this.vpMovie.play();
}

The movie from frame 51 to frame 155 handles the drawing of the cards which we will cover next.

Drawing the Cards

The drawing of new cards to replace selected cards is done on a per card basis so that Adobe Animate CC can animate the cards being replaced. The code to handle the drawing of the cards is similar for all the cards so we can create a simple utility function to handle the drawing. As this function needs to be accessed by code in different frames, we will make this utility function part of the VideoPokerGame class so the code is in the global script. As you can see, this function simply removes the draw state, hides the draw movie, and then sets the card’s value to the next card in the deck.

VideoPokerGame.prototype.drawCard = function(slot)

{

this.drawMovie[slot].visible = false;

this.hand[slot].setCard(this.myDeck.draw());

}

The draw animation consists of the card being removed followed by the new card being moved into place. This is simply a motion tween going from the full sized card to the small card hidden at the bottom of the screen. This is followed by a small card at the top of the screen motion tweened to a full size card. For the “FLCard” layer the removal tween is on frames 56 to 65 and the drawing tween is on frames 66 to 74. The “Lcard” layer has the removal tween on frames 76 to 85 and the drawing tween is on frames 86 to 94. For the “CCard” layer the removal tween is on frames 96 to 105 and the drawing tween is on frames 106 to 114. The “Rcard” layer has the removal tween on frames 116 to 125 and the drawing tween is on frames 126 to 134. Finally, the “FRCard” layer has the removal tween on frames 136 to 144 and the drawing tween on frames 146 to 154. The Figure \below shows the second half of the video poker timeline where drawing happens.

Right now all the cards are being drawn, and the value of the drawn card is the same value that the card already was. To fix these problems we are going to need to add some java script as well as a few more labels. Let us start by adding some code to the “Code” layer of  frame 55 which was labelled “Draw_1.” This code simply checks to see if the card is one of the cards that was selected to be replaced and if it is not skips over the replacement animation for this card. 

if (this.draw1_movie.visible == false)

this.gotoAndPlay("Draw_2");

If the card is not being drawn, we are done. If the replacement animation plays, however then we need to draw a card to replace the draw card. Once the card has been removed from the screen, we can then draw a card. This is done by calling the function we created earlier in this section. Notice that we use the array index of the card in the function, which is one less than the card that we are on. This is one area where API design can bite you in a project. If this was a team project where non-programmers were calling our API then using the semantics that the artist was expecting would make sense. In this case, we could have had the draw card function assume that the caller was referring to the human number and deduct 1 from the passed number. Ideally you would want to document decisions within the API documentation, but surprisingly this rarely happens and has bitten me a number of times when working with third-party libraries. 

In addition to the code for replacing the card, on Frame 66, we add a draw card sound to the Sound layer so that the sound of a card being drawn is played while the card is being animated in.

playSound("drawwav");

The above procedure is used for the other 4 cards with the draw sound being played on frames 86, 106, 126, and 146. The code is probably self explanatory, but for the sake of completeness I will show the code.

Frame 75 which is labelled “Draw_2”:

if (this.draw2_movie.visible == false)

this.gotoAndPlay("Draw_3");

Frame 86:

videoPokerGame.drawCard(1);

Frame 95 which is also labelled “Draw_3”:

if (this.draw3_movie.visible == false)

this.gotoAndPlay("Draw_4");

Frame 106:

videoPokerGame.drawCard(2);

Frame 115 which is also labelled “Draw\_4”:

if (this.draw4_movie.visible == false)

this.gotoAndPlay("Draw_5");

Frame 126:

videoPokerGame.drawCard(3);

Frame 135 which is also labelled “Draw\_5”:

if (this.draw5_movie.visible == false)

this.gotoAndPlay("Results");

Frame 146:

videoPokerGame.drawCard(4);

Finally we extend all layers to frame 155, label this frame “Results”. Calculating the results of the hand is the most complicated part of the game which we will cover in the next section.

Calculating the Win

The results of the hand can now be calculated. While this work is all done in a single function, the work is kind of complicated. For that reason, I will be breaking the function into a series of sections so I can better explain the logic behind the function. It would have been possible to break down the function into a number of smaller and more specialized functions, which may be a good idea as it simplifies the logic but at a cost of a lot of overhead and duplicate code. If I was going to refactor this function, I would turn it into it's own class so duplicate code could be reduced and the steps broken into separate private methods.

The first thing that is done is the cards are sorted by their face values. Face values are calculated by using the modulus (remainder) of dividing the deck by 13. To make this work, the card ID is reduced by 1.

VideoPokerGame.prototype.findResults = function()

{

var sortedCards = new Array(5);

var cntr1, cntr2, temp, low, testA, testB;

for (cntr1 = 0; cntr1 < 5; ++cntr1)

{

sortedCards[cntr1] = this.hand[cntr1].getCard();

}

// sort, by face value

for (cntr1 = 0; cntr1 < 4; ++cntr1)

{

low = cntr1;

for (cntr2 = cntr1 + 1; cntr2 < 5; ++cntr2)

{

testA = (sortedCards[low] - 1) % 13;

testB = (sortedCards[cntr2] - 1) % 13;

if (testB < testA)

low = cntr2;

}

temp = sortedCards[low];

sortedCards[low] = sortedCards[cntr1];

sortedCards[cntr1] = temp;

}

Next, we prepare all the variables that we are going to need to find the results. We use pairFace to track which card we are trying to match for a pair or triple or quad. We assume at the beginning of our testing that we have a straight and a flush until either of these assumptions are proven wrong during our analysis of the hand. The run is the longest number of matching faces so a run of 2 is a pair, a run of 3 is three of a kind, and a run of 4 is four of a kind. The suit of the first card is the suit we are looking for in the other four cards to determine if we have a flush.

var pairFace = 0;

var isStreight = true;

var isFlush = true;

var longestRun = 0;

var numRuns = 0;

var targetSuit = Math.floor((sortedCards[0] - 1) / 13);

var curRun = 1;

To be a flush, all suits must be the same, so we simply check to see that the suit of the current card in the loop is the same as that of the first card. To see if we have a pair or better, we track the run length of the current card by counting how many cards in a row contain the same face value. As it is possible for more than one pair, we also count how many different face cards are matching. Likewise, to handle a full house, we need to know the length of the longest run of matching cards. Straights are simply a test to make sure that the face value of each card in the sorted hand increases by one (taking into account the fact that an ace can be in two possible positions).

for (cntr1 = 1; cntr1 < 5; ++cntr1)

{

if ( Math.floor((sortedCards[cntr1] - 1) / 13) != targetSuit)

isFlush = false;

testA = (sortedCards[cntr1 - 1] - 1) % 13;

testB = (sortedCards[cntr1] - 1) % 13;

if (testA == testB)

{

isStreight = false;

++curRun;

}

else

{

if (curRun > 1)

{

if (curRun > longestRun)

longestRun = curRun;

curRun = 1;

++numRuns;

pairFace = testA; // if only a pair, need to know face value

}

if (((testB-testA) != 1) && ((testA != 0) || (testB != 9)))

isStreight = false;

}

}

if (curRun > 1)

{

if (curRun > longestRun)

longestRun = curRun;

++numRuns;

pairFace = testA; // if only a pair, need to know face value

}

Analysing the results is the last stage of determining what the hand was. This is done by using the various variables that were set in the analysis phase above and going from the highest value hand down to the weakest hand checking at each hand to see if we meet the criteria for the hand continuing until we have met the criteria for a hand or have a high-card.

// Now analyse results

if ((isStreight & isFlush) == true)

{

if (((sortedCards[4] - 1) % 13) == 12)

{

this.message = "ROYAL FLUSH!!!";

this.lastWin = 250 * this.bet;

}

else

{

this.message = "Streight Flush";

this.lastWin = 50 * this.bet;

}

}

else if (longestRun == 4)

{

this.message = "Four of a Kind";

this.lastWin = 25 * this.bet;

}

else if (longestRun == 3)

{

if (numRuns == 2)

{

this.message = "Full House";

this.lastWin = 9 * this.bet;

}

else

{

this.message = "Three of a Kind";

this.lastWin = 3 * this.bet;

}

}

else if (isFlush)

{

this.message = "Flush";

this.lastWin = 5 * this.bet;

}

else if (isStreight)

{

this.message = "Streight";

this.lastWin = 4 * this.bet;

}

else if (numRuns == 2)

{

this.message = "Two Pairs";

this.lastWin = 2 * this.bet;

}

else if ( (numRuns == 1) && ((pairFace == 0) || (pairFace > 9)) )

{

this.message = "Jacks or Better";

this.lastWin = this.bet;

}

else

{

this.message = "Nothing";

this.lastWin = 0;

}

this.cash += this.lastWin;

return (this.lastWin > 0);

}

Of course, being able to determine the results of a hand is not of much use unless we do something with those results so in the next section we will actually call this method and handle the results of doing so.

Handing the Results

In the results frame we have code that will call the find results method we wrote in the previous section. This code goes to the bet loop immediately if the result of the hand wasn’t a winning hand, otherwise the movie continues playing to give us time to show the results.

var didWin = videoPokerGame.findResults();

videoPokerGame.updateText();

if (didWin == false)

this.gotoAndPlay("BetWait");

To make winning more exciting Video Poker machines have bells and whistles go off when you win anything. This is part of the psychology of gambling and is a reinforcement factor to make the player more excited so they keep playing the game. The bell sound I use is a bit more subtle but still emphasizes that the player has won something so that is placed in frame 156. 

Finally we skip over some frames (so the result message will be shown for a few seconds) and we then place our final “Code” layer key-frame, which simply contains one line of code which goes back to the “betWait” frame.

this.gotoAndPlay("BetWait");

With that we have a complete Video Poker game. For those who want to take this a bit further It is not that difficult to modify the game to support the different types of Video poker such as deuces wild or variants that include a joker. Likewise creating a better deck of cards and running the game at a high-definition resolution would also be simple enough to do.  For the more ambitious people out there, this could be expanded into a full poker game, possibly even a multi-player game.

Have fun and when you are ready come back and explore the world of board games with Pent Up Anger.

Video Poker Part 1

As I only want to deal with 1 blog, I am posting the first half of chapter 8 of my "Creating HTML5 Games using AnimateCC" eBook at https://homebrewgamejam.blogspot.com/2019/12/video-poker-part-1.html where we cover the creation of my Video Poker game.

Porting Halloween Liche

My first real post and for some reason it is not showing up on my home page. For those who are interested in learning how I ported Halloween Liche from Flash to HTML5, the link is http://spelchan.ca/?p=10 I will continue fighting with wordpress but if I keep having issues will have to come up with a new plan.

When Blogs Collide

I have concluded that having two separate blogs is just too big of a pain. I am also thinking that posting chapters one section at a time is not the best approach. If I was to post entire chapters at a time would be more useful to anyone wanting to read my work. This obviously means that I will not be posting the new blog every week but instead will be cutting down to a long post once a month. Chapters from my animate (and possibly create.js) eBook will be posted once every 3 to 4 months, with posts on other subjects in between the chapter posts. The in-between posts will be about Spelchan.com content, game-jam or home-brew content, and articles related to what I am researching with the odd miscellaneous soapbox post appearing related to whatever thing got me angry enough to write a post.

This leads to the next question as to where these posts will appear. While I have nothing against blogger, I would prefer that it was on a site that I control. For that reason I set up WordPress on my Spelchan.ca site so my blog posts will appear on Spelchan.ca while my games appear on Spelchan.com. For the next while, I will probably be posting TLDR summaries on this blog for a while.

The first post will be on Halloween Liche and will be posted in the middle of October.

Creating the Deck class

Last section we created tests for building our deck class. Now we are ready to create a deck class. Initially we will create the code within the testDeck.html file but once it is functional move the code into the Deck.js file so it can be used by our various card projects. While it is certainly possible to create the code entirely within the Deck.js file and import that file, for prototyping it is often faster to write the code within the test file and iterate over the code before moving it to the appropriate class as during prototyping the structure of the code may change multiple times so keeping it outside of the main code-base until it is stable can make maintaining the project easier.

This class needs to hold 52 cards in a deck, deal out those cards, and shuffle those cards. First, we are going to need to create the constructor function for this class. This will just create an array for itself to hold the deck and fill that array with in-order values. We also set the index for where we are going to grab cards to the top of the deck.

spelchan.Deck = function()
{
this.cardArray = [];//new Array(52);
for (var cntr = 0; cntr < 52; ++cntr)
this.cardArray[cntr] = cntr + 1;
this.nextCardIndex = 0;
}

This means that we now have a deck of cards but running the test will still fail. While the card ids are in the deck, the deal method is not dealing them out! Dealing out a card is simply the matter of returning the card at the nextCardIndex while increasing the index.

spelchan.Deck.prototype.draw = function()
{
var rv = this.cardArray[this.nextCardIndex];
++this.nextCardIndex;
return rv;
}

Running the tests now show us that we are getting there but the shuffling is not sufficiently random enough to pass our test. This is because we are not shuffling the deck yet. We are going to need a way of shuffling the deck. Think about the different ways to shuffle a deck. There are many ways of shuffling, but most of them are inefficient as far as the computer is concerned. What our goal is, simply stated, is to make the cards in the deck appear in a random order. I realized that taking each card and swapping it at random with another card would be a very good way of shuffling as the computer can do this blindingly fast with really good results. While I came up with this algorithm on my own, my Algorithms teacher did tell me that I was not the first person to think of this and that this is like the technique that shuffling machines use.

spelchan.Deck.prototype.shuffle = function()
{
var cntr, temp, rnd;

for (cntr = 0; cntr < 52; ++cntr)
{
rnd = Math.floor(Math.random() * 52);
temp = this.cardArray[cntr];
this.cardArray[cntr] = this.cardArray[rnd];
this.cardArray[rnd] = temp;
}
this.nextCardIndex = 0;
}

Now when we run the test we see that all the tests have passed. We are now ready to start planning the tests we will be needing for a video poker game. There are other things that we could probably add to this class, but I have discovered over my years that it is easy to refactor and to add things later, especially if you have a testing framework to verify your changes don’t break anything. One tenant of Extreme Programming is to only write the code that you need. We have all that we need for video poker, so next chapter we will start working on a video poker game!

Test Driven Deck

While having a plan for testing your code is important, Test Driven Development (TDD) takes this to another level. The idea here is that you write automated tests before you start writing the code. When it is practical to do this, it is an incredibly good way of creating code. Planning tests gets you thinking about the code you are going to write – hopefully with an idea of the fringe cases that you are going to encounter. Writing the tests give you something to check the code against. All tests should initially fail, with a successful test likely indicating either an error with the test or an error with the test plan.

You then write the code and run it against the tests trying to pass one test at a time. Once you have passed all the tests and no missing tests have been discovered, you are finished the code and can start planning the tests for the next piece of code that you need to write. Having automated tests also means that it is easy to have the tests running frequently while you do other things and if something breaks then you know right away and as it is likely what you (or someone on your team) is currently working on, it will be trivial to fix the bug! Remember that in general the quicker you can find a bug, the less it will cost to fix it. This cost is in time, but can also be in money if the bug is in a production version and you have marketing and patching costs in addition to the cost of finding and fixing a bug.

We have a card class that can display any card, so what we need next is a deck of cards. This deck needs to be able to be shuffled and we need to be able to deal cards from the deck. So, how would we test such a beast?

In a sorted deck, the cards should be from 1 to 52 so simply drawing cards from a sorted deck and making sure they are in sequence would solve this problem. A shuffled deck, however, has two issues that we need to check for. First, we want to make sure that all the cards are in the shuffle (that we haven’t duplicated cards losing some cards or other similar problem). Next we want tom make sure the cards are not in order. Simply checking to see the card is different from its position in the deck will not work as we would expect that at least some of the time a randomly shuffled card would end up in the proper deck position. A good shuffle would have at least half the cards in a different position so simply counting how many cards don’t match would suffice most of the time.

As the deck class can be written without the card class, as it uses card IDs and not instances of cards, it is possible to write the deck class in its own html file which I called deckTest. This starts off with your typical html5 boilerplate followed by a simple version of the Deck class with none of the necessary methods implemented.

test results go here

Now some of you may have noticed that there is a lot of test code here. This is the downside to test driven development. You will often end up with test code that is the same size as the code that you are testing, and sometimes even larger. The plus side is that you know your code works within the testing parameters and if you refactor or change code you will be able to check to make sure that nothing you have done is broken. Manual testing could have been done with a lot less code. As always there is a trade-off that must be made. In a solo environment, and possibly a small team, manual testing may be adequate and may be productive enough. As you start to get to larger teams, people inadvertently mucking up other people’s code happens a lot more often than you would expect.

The Importance of Testing

Before you write any code you should have a way in your mind to test the code in order to make sure that the code does what you want. There are many types of tests but when you get right down to it, all tests are either manual or automated. Manual tests tend to be the easiest to implement as they just require some code that can be observed to be doing the correct thing. As games tend to be dynamic in nature, manual testing is very common in game development as coming up with automated tests is not always practical. Automated tests, however, are always preferable when possible to do so due to the simple fact that people do not have the time to go through hours of manual testing just to make a minor change. This means that most manual tests will only be run on rare occasions so that something may be broken for months before it is discovered making finding out why it broke difficult.

Due to the visual nature of the cards, automatic testing is not really that practical so we will resort to manual testing. More to the point, as the cards are poignant to the game, any problems with the card class will be detected immediately so manually testing them is not much of a risk. A very simple test program can be created to make sure that the card class works the way it is supposed to.

Create a new “CardTest” movie for holding the test. Copy the Card movie clip into this movie. This can be done by having a file with that movie open in another tab then in the library tab selecting that file and dragging the Card movie onto the stage. Make sure that the layer holding the card extends to the second frame. Add a layer for holding code and in the second frame create a blank keyframe in the code layer. Right-click and chose add actions to bring up the code editor for editing JavaScript on that frame. Here is the test code:

var firstCard = new spelchan.Card(this.firstCardMovie);
firstCard.setCard(1);
this.firstCardMovie.addEventListener("click", nextCard);
this.stop();

function nextCard(e) {
if (firstCard.faceShowing)
firstCard.setCard(firstCard.cardID + 1);
else
firstCard.showFace();
console.log("face: " + firstCard.getFaceValue() +
" suit: " + firstCard.getSuit());
}

While in the actions editor, make sure to add the Deck.js file to the includes by expanding the global list of scripts then selecting the include option and clicking on the + to add a script. Browse to find the script.

You can now simply click on the card to show the first card in the deck and keep clicking on the cards to loop through all the cards that make up a deck. This is a very simple test but one that confirms that the Card class is working as expected. Proponents of the technique known as test driven development would start with the test code and then write the actual code as we will see when creating the deck class that deals with handling a deck of cards.

Creating the Card Class

We will place all the code for the Card movie in an external JavaScript file. For some strange reason, Animate CC 2017 does not let you edit external JavaScript files (hopefully an over-site that will be fixed in future versions) so another editor will have to be used for editing the JavaScript file. There are numerous editors available that support JavaScript, with Notepad++ being the editor of choice for me when I am using a windows machine.

Before we can create the card class, however, we are going to want to create a separate namespace for holding our classes so that there are no conflicts with any other code that we are using. The easiest way of creating a namespace is simply to create a root object with the name of the namespace we wish to  use. This can be done as follows:

spelchan = spelchan | {};

You should already be familiar with the new operator, which is used for creating instances of a class. The format for this is

 new constructor([param1,...,paramn]);
 
What is happening is the new operator is trying to find a constructor function named whatever name was provided with the number of parameters indicated. Some constructor functions, such as Array, are built right in to JavaScript. It is, however, possible to create new Constructor functions by simply having a function named whatever it is you want to call the constructor. Convention has it that you start constructor functions with a capital letter. This is a good idea as it distinguishes them from other functions.

Constructors can have no parameters, or as many parameters as you desire. Here is the constructor function for our card class. Notice that it takes a reference to the movie clip that it will be controlling. We could have had the class create the movie clip but by passing the movie clip we make it easier to attach objects from the Animate CC editor to our class.

spelchan.Card = function(cardMovie) {
this.cardMovie = cardMovie;
this.cardID = 0;
this.faceShowing = false;
this.cardMovie.gotoAndStop(9+this.cardID);
}

As a class consists of data and the methods used to manipulate the data, the above constructor sets up a holder for the card movie, the id of the card, and a Boolean flag that indicates if the card is being shown. By default, the card is blank and is not being shown to the user. To set the card and show the card, we need to have some methods. This is where JavaScript gets kind of weird.

All classes are given a prototype object that holds functions and other variables that are available to any instance of that class. To add a function to a class, you need to add the function to the prototype object. This can be done two ways. First, you can create the function directly in the constructor by assigning the function name to the code for a function. The other way is to assign a function to the prototype, by using classname.prototype.functionname = function(...) { ... };

Let us implement the setCard and getCard methods. When the card’s value is changed, the card has to go to the proper frame of the movie and stop. However, if the card’s face is not showing, we show the back image instead. Getting the card value is simply the matter of returning the cardID variable.

// n is the cardID for the card
spelchan.Card.prototype.setCard = function(n)
{
if ((n < 1) || (n > 52))
this.cardID = 0;
else
this.cardID = n;
if ((this.cardID == 0) || (this.faceShowing == false))
this.cardMovie.gotoAndStop(1);
else
this.cardMovie.gotoAndStop(9+this.cardID);
}

// returns the cardID for the card
spelchan.Card.prototype.getCard = function()
{
return this.cardID;
}

We now have the ability to change the card but as the face is not being shown, we have no way of verifying this. Showing a card is simply a matter of setting the faceShowing variable to true and going to the appropriate frame. The only complication is the fact that we need to handle a card that has yet been assigned a value. Hiding the face is even easier as we set faceShowing to false then stop on the blank card frame.

// shows the face side of the card
spelchan.Card.prototype.showFace = function()
{
this.faceShowing = true;
if (this.cardID == 0)
this.cardMovie.gotoAndStop(1);
else
this.cardMovie.gotoAndStop(9+cardID);
}

// shows the back of the card
spelchan.Card.prototype.hideFace = function()
{
this.faceShowing = false;
this.cardMovie.gotoAndStop(1);
}

This is all that is needed for a card class, but creating a couple of utility methods for getting the face of the card and the suit of the card is easy enough to do. This is done using math. The modulus function, which uses the % operator,  gives you the remainder of a division. Had we started counting from 0, this would work great, but as we didn’t subtracting one from the card id lets us use modulus to get the face value from 0 to 12 and adding 1 corrects this. A similar technique can be used to determine which of the four suits are being used by seeing which group of 13 the card falls into.

7-1 Creating the Card Movie

As you already know, a deck of cards consists of 52 cards (54 if you count the two jokers, but for now we won’t worry about those). Obviously, this means that we are going to need 52 images. In addition to the images for every card, we are also going to need an image for the back of the cards.

There are two ways we can create images for the cards. One way, if you already have a set of bitmaps for the cards, is to simply import the 52 bitmap images. The advantage of this is speed. The disadvantage is that the resulting images are not vectors and will not scale well. One way to get around the vector problem would be to convert every card into a vector image. This only takes a slight bit more time and you end up with better scalability.

The other way is to build the cards in Animate CC (or a vector drawing program that lets you export images to Animate CC). This can potentially reduce the overall size of the deck by a fair amount. Having the cards being proper vector images also enables very good scalability. If you don’t already have a set of bitmap card images, then creating the cards in Adobe Animate CC will take just as long as it would to create them in a bitmap based paint program.

For this book, we are going to build all the cards in Adobe Animate CC. One way would be to simply create 53 graphic images. This works, but when you look at a deck of cards you will quickly notice that the cards are only made up of a small subset of images. If we create a series of symbols for the components that make up a card, we will easily be able to create the entire deck by assembling our components. This helps reduce both the time it takes to build the deck of cards and the amount of memory required for the cards at the cost of taking a bit more time to draw the cards but as card games are not fast-paced games this is not a huge concern.

When you think about it, a set of cards can be broken into 34 components. Making this even better, most of these are small components that only take a few curves to represent. The components used in this are shown in figure below.

Now, the top line consists of “Blank Card”, “Jack”, “Queen”, King. The Blank Card symbol is the background symbol. Notice that we surround the card with a hairline box. The card is 100 by 140 as that is the resolution I had in the bitmap deck that I created for my Java card games. The cards could be any size you desired, and because they are vectors the cards will look good scaled up or down.

The second line Consists of the suits, named “Spade,” “Heart,” “Club,” and “Diamond”. The third and fourth lines consist of the card face value text. There are two versions, one for black cards and one for red cards. The symbols are named, “Blk A,” “Blk 2,” “Blk 3,” “Blk 4,” “Blk 5,” “Blk 6,” “Blk 7,” “Blk 8,” “Blk 9,” “Blk 10,” “Blk J,” “Blk Q,” “Blk K,” “Red A,” “Red 2,” “Red 3,” “Red 4,” “Red 5,” “Red 6,” “Red 7,” “Red 8,” “Red 9,” “Red 10,” “Red  J,” “Red Q,” and “Red K.”

Once we have created the components, we are going to need to create a card movie. The purpose of this movie is to hold the images for all the cards and go to the appropriate image based on what value is assigned to the card. I have decided to give each card a numerical ID, which is as follows. The ID of 0 represents no visible value (in other words the card back is shown). cards are then given ID in numerical order, with Aces being the first card and kings being the last. We go through the suits in alphabetical order, so we have the Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, then Spades.

As the ID can be simply calculated based on the value of the card (Aces being valued as 1, Jacks valued as 11, Queens valued as 12 and Kings valued as 13), it makes sense to take advantage of this fact. We do this by mathematically determining the position of the card. How? Every card is a single frame. We have the card back on frame one and start the first card on frame 11. We then simply need to add 10 to the ID to find the correct frame for the card face. Note that Create.js uses 0 based indexing instead of the 1 based indexing that non-canvas animations use. This will mean that the frame numbers will be off by one so care needs to be taken when writing the JavaScript for going to specific frames using the frame number.

Now, a bit of code is going to be in order. We are going to need to get and set the ID of the card. We also want to be able to show the back or the front of a card. While neither of the games in this part of the book use this feature, it is simple enough to implement and will be of obvious use with many other card games. This will be covered next fortnight.

Chapter 7 Overview

One nice feature of card games, is that once you have created a card game you are able to take advantage of existing assets and code to handle the cards so that creating other card games in the future is easier. In this chapter we are going to take advantage of this in two ways.

First, in ``Creating the Card Movie'' we are going to create a card movie. This movie will have frames for all the cards in a deck and will be able to display any specified card. While fairly simple to build, creating a deck of cards is a time-consuming process. Thankfully, we only need to do it once. After the card movie has been created, you simply need to drag it into the new Animate CC project to use it in other card games. You could also place it into a common library.

Next we are going to create some JavaScript classes. For the most compatibility, which probably is not that big of a deal as most browsers in use support ECMAScript 6 JavaScript code, we are going to use the older and most compatible way of creating classes. In ``Creating the Card Class'' we create the class for handling the cards while in ``The Importance of Testing'' we test this class.

Test driven development, which is a very common practice now, does things the opposite way so in ``Test Driven Deck'' we create the tests for a deck class and with the tests ready to go actually create the deck class in ``Creating the Deck Class''

Once we have these classes created we will be able to build our Video Poker game.

Spelchan.com Summer 2019

Blazing Games has been closed, at least the home page has. For the moment I am leaving the other pages up so if you know the link to a game then you can still go to the page. This will be eventually changing but I'm in no rush here. I produced a lot of Games so there is a huge amount of porting work to do. I have reviewed the  results of the poll and as a result have made changes to my release plans for this year.

Coffee Quest was released a month early. My holiday games seem to be slightly more popular than I expected.  For this reason I am going to make sure that I have holiday games ported as appropriate. This decision has me in the process of porting my Canada Day flag game for release this Canada Day (July 1st for non-Canadian visitors). Next year I will release my Independence Day game for my American friends.

I have decided that, in memory of my Mother, I am going to only release Color Collapse episodes on Mother's Day but do plan on creating related games once the remaining two episodes have been released. 

I noticed that the voting list of games missed some of the games that were already in HTML5 so those will become filler for when I am too busy to finish porting other games. The first of these will be Sudoku which will be released in August as my card and dice collection are very low in popularity. A beta of Coffee Quest 2  will hopefully be released this September with a Halloween game for October. November’s release is not yet determined yet and will be dependent on my time in September and October and I plan on creating a unique Christmas game this year.

I am not going to have any official release schedule for 2020 (other than a game every month) but do plan on showcasing the games I am working on in whatever game I am going to release in January. Hint, it will not be an updated Calendar NIM game this time.

So hopefully you will enjoy the site. Next fortnight I will start the next chapter of my Creating HTML 5 Games with Animate eBook so hope you continue reading.

Final Touches

As is quite often the case with my games, the last part of the game that is created is the title screen. The first part of the title screen is the game's logo. My One of the Weeks logo is not really appropriate, even though this game is part of that series, so to make this a stand-alone game I created a new logo. For the start button, I opted for a door as that is emblematic of the game play. As always, the code to control the button is very straight forward.

spelchan.Nightmare.prototype.startTitle = function() {
this.playButtonHandler = this.playButtonClicked.bind(this);
this.stage.playBtn.addEventListener("click", this.playButtonHandler);
this.stage.stop();
}

spelchan.Nightmare.prototype.playButtonClicked = function(e) {
console.log("Play Button Clicked!");
this.stage.playBtn.removeEventListener("click", this.playButtonHandler);
this.stage.gotoAndPlay("Intro");
}

One problem that I had with the game at this point was the fact that someone who started playing the game without reading the instructions would be totally confused by what was going on. While confusion may actually add to the story, it can also turn a lot of people off the game. As this is the first episode of a series, one thing I don't want is to turn people off the game.

While I would like to think that people read the instruction pages that I put a some effort into creating, the reality is that a lot people just start playing the game.

One solution would be to have a link to the instructions on the game's title screen. The problem with doing this is that the people who skip over the instructions page are likely to not bother clicking on the instructions button either. This means that I would end up putting more time into creating the instruction pages - which is more time consuming then writing an instruction page - which few people are going to read. This is obviously not a good solution.

The solution I did for this episode is to incorporate the background portion of the instructions into the game by starting the player at an explanation screen. This is simply a looped animation of the text bubble growing then shrinking. The code for handling the button is also very simple.

spelchan.Nightmare.prototype.setIntroButton = function(e) {
this.introButtonHandler = this.introButtonClicked.bind(this);
this.stage.con_btn.addEventListener("click", this.introButtonHandler);
}

spelchan.Nightmare.prototype.introButtonClicked = function(e) {
console.log("Intro Button Clicked!");
this.stage.con_btn.removeEventListener("click", this.introButtonHandler);
this.stage.gotoAndPlay("enterRed");
}

And that is all there is to the game. Next fortnight we will look at changes to my Blazing Games porting plans and next month we will start chapter 7 which sets the foundation for the creation of video poker.

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.