Final major project evaluation

Having decided to create something for children to warn them of safety in the real and virtual worlds I started by having a few chats with the head-teacher of my local school, who liked my ideas and felt that something "interactive" would be more beneficial than simply making a movie for kids to watch.
I did intend on making a flash based animation, either with or without some interactive options, and my daughter was set to do a voice over for me reading out either a story or a poem devised by myself, however due to unforeseen circumstances this could not be arranged and so I had to think of another way to get the narrative into my story.
I did not want my idea to be hampered by my inadequate drawing skills and lack of interactive knowledge inn flash, so set out to look at other ways of producing the story that I wanted to create.
I thought about working with some of my peers and perhaps asking them to create characters for me, I even tamed up with another peer for a day who was working on characters and planned on creating a narrative around their ideas but this would have been changing my original brief too much so decided to go back to what I had and stick with that.
So it took me a while to get my head around this, despite it being my own brief, I was having doubts about whether this was what I really wanted to do or not, a relative had died recently and al I could think about was death, something I have been preoccupied with in past projects, and I really wanted to use this energy to create a new brief, however time was running out and my brief had already been submitted.
I don't quite know where the idea to use little big planet came from, I was playing it one day, and decided to look at some of the online levels members of the community have created and uploaded, and was amazed at the potential in it for me to be able to realize my ideas without having to worry too much about visual presentation and drawing skills, or lack of!
Don't get me wrong I am not putting myself down, I know I can doodle pretty good and anyone can draw if they put their mind to it, it's just one of those things I have found very difficult at times, especially when it comes to drawing anything other than characters which is all I ever draw.
Anyway I never thought I would be able to do anything on little big planet, thinking it would be far too hard, and shuddering at the memories I have of second life and maya I turned my console off and returned to fretting about how I was going to do this with all that I have going on in my life at this moment in time.
Luckily for me a friend who had never even used little big planet before saw how down I was about it, and decided to have a go at creating something just to see how easy or hard it was, and within a few seconds they had made a small building with some windows in it and showed it to me, I was gobsmacked at how easy it was, it was nothing like second life or maya! I did not need mathematical or 3D skills, all I needed was my imagination and an idea, which I had, so from there on I felt very positive about getting this done and couldn't believe I hadn't tried it out sooner.
I have now created an entire level based around my ideas and characters for this project and am very pleased with it and think it is a vast improvement over some of my more recent projects.
To begin with I just went in with a few ideas not thinking much about how each scene would fall into the next, I also didn't realize that there was a gauge meter to the left that decided how much more you could put into a level or that the levels has a pre-set size! I just assumed they went on and on till you stopped creating!
I realized this halfway through and decided to just use this as an experimental attempt and so I continued putting in a few things that didn't really work but just to practice and see what I could do with it.
I then decided to start over, building the characters and buildings again from scratch, but this time making them look better and adding or taking away details where needed. For example, some of the events seemed to last a bit too long on my practice level, thus taking up too much room and loosing their meaning in favor of lengthy walkthroughs and unnecessary obstacles.

So in the final level I decided to keep things short and sweet and added a disappearing character at regular intervals to warn children about the dangers they were about to face in the game.
I was going to throw in some statistics about knife crime and fires etc but after searching for hours on the net for up to date information I gave up and decided that primary school children did not need to know that, that statistics might only scare them too much, plus things like that will only go in and out one ear with children, they are much more visual and throwing numbers at them would have been meaningless.
If I had thought of this earlier it might have been a useful tool to have as a caption at the bottom of the screen, but as it stands I am happy with the game as it is.
I am not sure however if I should leave this as a game or record it onto a disc as a short animation, I think leaving it as a game would be better although am a bit concerned that there may not be enough gameplay activities to make for an interesting game.

I really enjoyed creating on little big planet and am definitely going to use this again to create games and stories with a view to learning more techniques and creating some more advanced and professional gameplay tactics.