Simon Says and zeroing in on a target

I was travelling for most of this past week, so I unfortunately did not progress as far as I would have liked on my project.

However, I finished a working copy of my Simon Says game and have begun investigating how to add a mouse moved listener for a game such as Ball Catch.

I have settled on the following as being the features I need to nail in order to make game creation work well in Looking Glass:

1. Adjustable Difficulty
2. Continuous Movement
3. Score keeping mechanism (i.e. global variables that aren't Boxes)
4. Basic physics
5. Logging

Some of these are more concrete than others.  For instance, continuous movement from input and a score keeping mechanism are pretty easy to think about and measure if it is implemented.  Adjustable difficulty on the other hand means something different for every game.  A relatively straightforward way to do this would be to allow certain variables about the world to be specified as "Game Variables".  There could then be a place in the world where you have a list of difficulties, and you set the values of these game variables according to which difficulty you want.  Ideally this difficulty adjustment would be more continuous than discrete, so hoepfully we could interpolate values for in between the set difficulty levels.

As far as basic physics goes, I am trying to determine how much of the physics should be exposed to the user.  A simple "toggle gravity" seems like it would be useful and also simple enough to understand.  I also think we can expose applying a force to something.  For instance, push this thing in this direction this hard.  Combining this with the gravity will require some under the hood support to make it work.

Logging is an interesting and important problem.  From past research, it seems like there needs to be a lot of logging about how much the user is actually moving.  This type of logging may make more sense on the input level.  However, there does need to be higher level game logging to help measure progress.