Color Swapper

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  Title Screen

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  Gamemode Select

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  Ingame Screenshot

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  Game Over Screen

Inspiration

This game was inspired by various old flash games that I used to play on the internet as a child in elementary school.

What it does

Color Swapper is a casual mobile game where the player must quickly change the color of two bars on the side of their screen to the given color of two dots or they’ll lose the game. The game includes:

• A Score keeping + a high score system.
• Various gamemodes.
• An easy-to-navigate and simplistic interface.

How I built it

This app was created using a web program called MIT App Inventor 2. It was a challenge to use at first because I was never introduced to it before 2015. Over time, I have gained experience by playing around with the editor and looking up tutorials on the internet.

All of the graphics were designed by me in a vector image editing program called Inkscape. While designing the graphics, I wanted to go for a neon and simplistic theme.

Challenges I ran into

One major challenge I ran into was scheduling when I would work on the app while also keeping up commitments with other extracurricular activities and school assignments. In addition, I had to work on the app mostly at home because I could not download the software I needed to make the app on my school's computers.

As far as programming the game, the most major problem I had ran into was sequencing events that happened in the game (such as getting the game over screen to show, what buttons do when pressed, etc). I was able to overcome this problem once I learned how to define functions/procedures in the game.

Another problem I faced was indexing the colors of the bars and dots. It was confusing as I had to identify each color in the game as a number in the code in order for colors to be randomly picked, as App Inventor cannot assign random colors, only numbers.

Another problem was that App Inventor does not support any animations, graphic effects, etc. Because of this, there are no animations, effects, or transitions in the game.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

1. This is my very first mobile app and many people I know seem to like it.
2. This is my first experience programming in App Inventor. Before, I used Scratch and HTML+CSS+JavaScript.

What I've learned

From this project, I've learned the problems a programmer must face when coding something and the troubleshooting skills needed to debug your code.

I've learn more about GUI and graphic design so that the user can feel comfortable playing my game.

What's next for Color Swapper

In the future, I may potentially add...

1. More gamemodes
2. A leader board stored in a database
3. Graphical improvements
4. Background music

Built With

• mit-app-inventor