Developing an Animated Game
When I started working with Microsoft Agent, my kids loved watching the little blue guy named Genie, who appears in a puff of smoke and talks to them. When they could talk back to that little blue guy and see him understand what they were saying, they went absolutely nuts! So one night after they went to bed, I started writing what would eventually become the I’m Thinking of a Color program.
NOTE: I’m thinking of a color? In case you don’t know, playing I’m thinking of a color is very similar to playing I’m thinking of a number. The host secretly picks a color, and then the players take turns trying to guess the color. The first person to correctly guess the color is the winner.
The first generation of this program supported only the host (which was the computer) and one player (a human). While that was interesting, I thought about the three different Agent characters from Microsoft and decided to try to use all of them. There are a lot of applications that can benefit from using one Agent, but here’s one that can use three. You can see the three Agents in the program’s window, as shown in Figure 14.14.
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Figure 14.14: The I’m Thinking of a Color program