Feed The Nine-Mouthed Baby

I’m guessing that many of the people on here might not have seen this early game that I made:

Feed the Nine-Mouthed Baby

If you’re a person who knows a bit of programming in Flash you might be surprised to hear that almost the entire thing is driven by the timeline and not actionscript.

This was back in the days when programming something like my hedgehog game would have been completely beyond me, so I put all of the sound files on the timeline with a frame name then animated the mouth over the right place.

I found that the dropTarget command wouldn’t recognise a movie clip, for some reason, so all of the mouth movements are animated individually from their graphic instances.

Each of these one-phrase sections then only had one draggable object, the one being asked for. These days I would use an ‘if’ loop to make the correct object draggable, but this was the only way I knew at the time.

I then had a couple of simple scripts running, one to generate a random number between one and nine for the movie to know which one-line section to play, another for a timer, and another for the end of the timer to judge whether enough objects had been correctly fed.

Sometimes old methods can be the most effective! If you’re making something in Flash don’t always be obsessed with doing it the most technical way, sometimes a bit of the old-fashioned skills such as timeline tweening can be equally effective in achieving the results you want.

3 thoughts on “Feed The Nine-Mouthed Baby”

  1. I’m always happy to remind people of old traumatic experiences. Think of it as Fruedian therapy: without facing the traumas of the past you cannot be free in the future! 🙂

  2. this was the first thing i played on your site. i saw a link on another site for it and thought it sounded interesting. ive been coming to your site ever since. that was a few years ago, mabey you remember i emailed you cause my friend thought you had to be on acid to come up with that. i bet him a dollor ya wernt, and he actually paid when you emailed me back and said ya wasnt.
    well ive babbled for enough.
    fun game

    btw i did set this as my homepage as per your instruction in your last email 😛
    it was just google anyway…

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