Day 21: Making “Cents” of it All

I finished a beta version of a little Flash game for the Mensa site today. The functionality is pretty simple — it picks three coin types (pennies, nickles, dimes, quarters, half dollars) and a random number between 1 and 21. It tells you the total amount, and you have to figure out how many coins were used to get that total.

There’s still at least three things I need to do with this. First (and most significant) is the formatting of the total. There doesn’t appear to be a built-in function in ActionScript for formatting currency, and the one freebie I found on the internet didn’t work. I’ll play with this some more and hopefully get it working tomorrow. Number two on my list of things to fix is the fact that you have to press the ‘Submit’ button — no pressing enter from the text box. And finally, I’d like to add a nice little ‘Loading’ animation at the beginning. Speaking of animation, it wouldn’t hurt for it to do a little something for a correct answer.

I took the background from IStockPhoto — I didn’t know til last week they gave away a free weekly royalty-free photo. I’ve decided, in the interest of expanding my designing portfolio, to use as many of their free photos as possible. I think that’ll keep me from doing the same sort of “safe” designs all the time.