A M A N D A H O S T A L K A

LAB 4: JUNK YARD DOG

Don't get too close to the fence.

I added further visual changes tied to the proximity value so the pit bulls are not visible until the mouse gets too close. The pit bulls are placed at a specific location at start and "jump" up when mouse is within range. Having all the dogs be the same dog gives the effect of one dog jumping and moving around as the mouse does. Because my idea did not necessarily mesh with making the objects meaningfully draggable, I added flies buzzing around the screen and ambient sound for the flies by creating a Document Class to hold the sound and to import in fliesClass and sounderClass. A challenge I had was to get a fly in a fixed position to rotate on every reset so they appear to be flying the right way I got pretty close (not 100%) by setting a random rotation on the reset based on which direction(s) the flies were travelling. This creates a kind of buzzing back and forth that was pretty effective. I also have the flies reset off stage so they do not appear to be "rebounding."

A second challenge was finding a decent image of an attacking pit bull. Harder than you might think, I had to settle for this grossly pixelated one. As a point of information, pit bull books and web sites try to paint pit bulls in a positive light (ie: no attack images). Those that don't, show injured people, not mean dogs........sorry for the bad image.

Sources: Background image and dog: google images. Fence: vector pattern from istockphoto.com.