The decision to create Metazooa Jr. was based on the team’s desire to create a game with bright graphics while being educational. Dr. Patrick Herak suggested we look into the game Metazooa and create something similar to the current game.
Before the team could start working on the coding, there were a few major files that needed to be created beforehand. The first main file that needed to be created was the Excel sheet that laid the connections between all of the animals that would be included in the database. This was relatively easy and only some of the animals did not have connections with other animals. The next step in the development of this game was creating a sprite sheet drawing out all of the animals and the background for the game along with all of the buttons that were to be included in the game. After these two files were made the engineering team was able to start the code. As the team began coding, there were some minor and major errors present. One minor error the team had to debug was not putting double quotation marks around the animal names. MATLAB thought these animals were character arrays and not string arrays causing the input values not to match up with the animals in the database. The major bugs were found when the team started coding the game to be playable in the draw scene. One of the goals was to create working buttons so the player could press the button instead of typing in the animal guess. While testing the buttons, the input was not working properly. Therefore, no clues were provided to the player. To fix this issue, we coded the buttons differently while using a function. The second major bug that appeared in the draw scene was getting the replay button to work. Since the player is only allowed three guesses during the game, if the player lost, the mouse input would not be present, and therefore the player would not be able to press the play again button. To fix this issue, the engineering team created another if statement to be able to replay the game.
With collaboration between Team L and TAs from class and in the open labs, the code was able to become bug-free, and an educational game was created. The team was able to learn more about coding and project development along with advertising and selling the product.