Let me just start by saying I had incredibly high hopes for my little whale game. I started a month ago because I knew that I had been challenged in this class and I wanted to really end with a great project. I showed everyone my master blueprint for this game, a twist on the space invaders game we learned and I was excited to make it from scratch.

It started well enough. i drew the illustrations, had a master plan, and went to action about 2 weeks ago. The whale, trash, water, and water spout were all drawn and the coding began. Then began my hell. I kept getting the "non-null" error. At first, ok, I did forget to name the instances, but that was only about a day of the craziness, after that, the instances were named, and by all comparison to other codes I found, my little whale should have been spouting away at the trash. But nothing. He sat there, mocking me with his little immobile spout. Days past, and I sat and stared, and changed, and started over the code to my whale game. Nothing. I studied the internet, books I bought, emailed Steve and Candice frantically. Nothing. I even emailed Stuart on Saturday afternoon, after I had spent all morning (and mind you, when I say all morning, I mean it--really--not like 10 am noon, I'm talkin 6:30 am to 1 pm) trying to figure it out. He said it seems like there is no "theBullet" instance, and to "hang in there." (we'll see if that bit of advice pans out soon enough.) Anyho, there was an instance named "theBullet" for pete's sake, it just wasn't jivin with my as. files. I was defeated. I decided failing was my only option at this juncture. So at 10 pm last night, I drank some chocolate milk and headed to my bed to cry myself to sleep, visions of my happy trash-eatin whale swimming around in my skull.

This morning I went to work incredibly conscious of the deadline looming for my final project. Candice emailed me that others had posted them but not to look because it would only depress me. It did. I got home, asked my mother if she would watch my little one for one last evening until next semester, and started pluggin away. I deleted my whale and bullet files and reimported them (even though I had done this 1000 times before). Nothing but null. So I started to systematically comment out the hit tests and things i knew that were throwing it. My little pieces of trash started falling and I knew I was getting close. Then I noticed I accidently imported my bullet on the wrong layer so I cut it and pasted it in the appropriate layer. When I did that, I then moved the layer from the top most layer to under the whale so the stream of water would come from behind him, went to test it, and NULL. That was it. For some reason I am still not sure of, my bulletmc layer wouldn't work unless it was within the top 3 layers. I went through and tested my theory and that was the reason. I didn't think the layers had any bearing on the as files, but apparently I was wrong.

So I've only had about 2 hours to make everything else I wanted to happen, which obviously didn't happen. My game is pretty jacked up. It is so sad, but I figured something was better than nothing--my way of stickin it out.

I was really tempted to scan in my wonderful plan that I'd drawn up many weeks ago, when I was young and hopeful of a happy little video game. But now I'm exhausted, pissed that I wasted so much time on nothing, and can only pray for the mercy.