Stills from my Interactive story

Okami/flash inspiration

Just some pictures from the playstation 2 game "Okami" the artwork in this game is absolutely stunning and inspired me in my flash based project.

Of course my artwork is nowhere near as good as this, however i took the bold ink outlines and bright colors and made it my own.

this style can also be seen in price of persia the new one for the 360, although with that the drawings are more realistic but with a strong ink outline, the drawings in Okami are much more imaginative and very highly stylized.

I was also inspired just by cartoons in general because I watch alot of them.

(Don't believe this but just tried to add the pictures which were in my "home folder" as am at college and my home folder has vanished!  I can't get into it at all i am just greeted with this message: the volume for kb76096 cannot be found.) what the hell is going on now? I have work in there!

Drag and drop

Well I found a website (http://www.entheosweb.com/Flash/default.asp) that had a tutorial on how to use drag and drop, the code I got from there was: 

on (press) {

startDrag (this,false) ;

}

on (release) {

stopDrag ();

}

which is totally different to the code I have for my cat test and the one on annamorphic.co.uk with the keys and the locks?

yet this one works! but all it does it allow you to drag and drop the queen movie clip, nothing happens when she placed in a paticular spot as with the fish and the cat, so what I need to know now is, do i need an entirely different script for that? or can I add to this one? 

fingers crossed that i find out before monday! I will be on here searching till then, no sleep!

Well and truly F****d!

Well this is the last scene in my flash interactive story/game and I can't do it! I must have missed the lesson on the keys to the lock because it does not look familiar, I have looked it up on the website: annamorphic.co.uk, however none of it makes sense to me and I don't know what to do,  I cannot download any of the files as clicking on the download link leads to a screen full of jumbled text? 

I want to be able to drag the mushroom queen to to various different groups of mushroom, (as you can see in the picture) when the wrong group is targeted you will be greeted with a "try again" message until the correct batch of mushrooms is hit and then you get your ending- game over- you win scene!

But I can't do it! 

I have a tutorial file in which I made a cat and a fish, the fish could be dragged around the screen and when it was released over the cat the cat would meow and text appeared, I have tried to copy this code into the above mushroom scene, however nothing happens? I changed the instance names of course but still nothing! 

what am I going to do? 

here is the code i tried to use: 

queen_mc.onPress = Function() {

startDrag(this);

}

queen_mc.onRelease = Function()

{

stopDrag();

}

this is the code off the website:  (is it because one of these } isn't at the start of the script?)

key.onPress = function() {
this.startDrag(true);
updateAfterEvent();
};

key.onRelease = function() {
this.stopDrag();
if (this.hitTest(lock)) {
gotoAndStop("room1");

Mushroom Panic!

Ah what a cheesy title! this is my mushroom scene in which the player finds themselves in mushroom land where you are greeted by a group of mushrooms! as the mushrooms are static images on the background it took alot of thought and effort (and help from Anna) to get this to work. basically, I made speech bubbles as buttons, in the up state they are not there, but once you rollover a mushroom (the hit area) the bubble will appear, and if you click down more text will appear, then the middle mushroom will give you a choice of helping them or not, you then get to choose yes or no.

I'm not saying what happens if you choose though, you'll have to play it to find out!

However after testing this scene on a number of people I have discovered from feedback that there needs to be some direction as to which mushroom you should click on first, for example if you were to click on the middle one first, you would be greeted with the question: "will you help us?" and you would be taken to a duplicate scene which then offers you a choice.

but if you had not clicked on the other mushrooms first you would not know where you were or why and what they wanted your help for!

so some direction prompting is needed, especially if children are playing it, so that the story flows better.

I was thinking of having a mushroom jumping up and down to entice you to click on that one first, and then then when you have released the mouse another will jump and so on so that they are pressed in the right order, however I don't know how I am going to do this unless i create the whole thing again from scratch as the mushrooms are part of the background.

then how would I do this? make them into jumping movie clips? but then how would i make them stop jumping in order for another to start? how would I tell flash to make the 2nd one jump after the first has stopped? I can't really get my head around it at the moment but I'd really like to do that.

another thought which although won't be as effective could also work is to have say a little fairy, fly in and hover above the mushroom I want the player to press for a number of seconds and then move to the next and so on, this could be done using tweens and timing, so could work but would not be as accurate as the other method.

I did the Grave-yard Scene!

I finally worked out a way to do my graveyard scene without Anna's help! (as I couldn't get hold of her) The idea is basically that a ghost pops up from each grave when you press the button, but when I started the project I didn't really know what I was doing so I just made the ghosts pop up using tweens, (which I did with the whole thing, wasting alot of time as it would then have to be re-done using actionscripts anyway!) I thought about making the graves buttons so that when you hit them the ghost pops up, another idea I had was to duplicate the scene 3 times and in each duplicate scene have an animation of the ghost popping up from each grave, then using action script on the original screen- make it so that when you release the button on the grave you are taken to the duplicate scene and you them see the animation for that scene, etc etc. at the end of watching the duplicate you are routed back to the original using scripting and then you can select all over again! this was a bit tricky, as when you were on one of the duplicate scenes the other buttons did not work, nor did the one you had just pressed! so I decided to put the script on all of the buttons on each duplicate scene so that from a duplicate screen you could also move to another duplicate scene, rarther than having to wait to return to the main scene, and it would have been odd not being able to press the buttons when a ghost was in action!

got all that?

anyway this caused the sound to be a bit messed up as i had it on each scene, and they were over-lapping, so i just left it on the main scene but it still had a weird overlapping sound, in the end i just put it on each scene with a start and a stop, so the music restarts each time you click a button but that sounds better than it did before.

also I created a "back" button so that players can return to the previous scene when they've had enough, but that only appears on the main graveyard scene after about 4 seconds, so the only issue i have with that is that you have to wait 4 seconds to return, or if you haven't clicked any of the graves in that 4 seconds- you may just clic back because it appeared and therefore miss out on some of the game! (I have tested this with a few people and they instantly went for the back button when it appeared) I would like to fix this but am not sure what to do? if i make it appear later that would give players more time to "explore" the scene, but then when they have finished they would have to not touch anything for a while for the back button to appear, (as touching a button would start the whole process again) so hopefully I will see Anna in time before the deadline to get some assistance with this as there was no-body free in the studio today! and Simon is teaching all day tomorrow so it all depends!

Meet The Mushroom Queen!

Vectorized Images for my Flash Animation

I don't know why but some of them have changed color as they have been uploaded to here! and the outlines have gone grey on others. These are just what I have managed to get done so far, I am getting on with the animation now and hope to find the time to add some more later so that there is more variety! 

Animation- New and Old

We were asked to look at some animation as part of our animation brief, something historical and something contemporary that has perhaps inspired us for our current brief? 

The first thing that comes to mind is Satoshi Kon's 2006 Paprika, I have blogged about this before, however thought I would mention it again as it was the first thing that sprang to mind when I got this brief. I have chosen to base my flash animation on Pylones gifts, which are quirky household items and more that have been personified to the point where it is not clear what they actually are. I decided to use this to my advantage and have the items as characters in a short animation, that way I  could give them more of a "story" as such, as there is not really alot you can do with toasters and umbrellas in terms of a narrative. well you could if you have some sick animation skills, I seem to recall pixar or one of those companies actually made a short movie about a toaster, but that's them and this is me! someone who can barely use flash! Anyway back to paprika, It is Satoshi Kon's 4th movie following in the success of perfect blue, millenium actress and tokyo godfathers and Is based on an invention known as the DC mini in which a user can penetrate another's dream as a result of a revolutionary new form of psychotherapy. Paprika is the alter ego of a doctor atsuko chiba, created to provide dream therapy illegally to her patients. I can't really explain the film in any more detail as it just goes completely crazy and it takes a couple of watches to fully "get" it, but visually the film is stunning as with all his works, and has a focus on the delicacy of the human mind as with all his features including the spectacular series paranoia agent.

The music for the film is what stuck in my head above all else accompanied by the crazy dream like imagery, particularly the parade scene which although colorful and child-like in essence has an underlying horror type feel that seems to stick in your head. The scene show's inanimate objects and cultural icons along with musical instroment playing animals marching in a parade.

For a historical piece I have chosen to look at Jan Svanmajer's ALICE which scared the S***

Out of me when I saw it as a child! I'd never seen stop motion animation before and just that alone freaked

me out, the awkward and un-natural way in which the rabbit moved alongside his and other objects in the

films hideous appearance was enough to scare me half to death! well it can't have scared me that much

as I still watched the whole thing, I think it just freaked me out a bit and I watched it for curiosity more than

anything else, It was a big step from the usual disney and cuddley teddys that I had to see this grotesque

rabbit and old antique furniture and knick knacks, It was like nothing i had seen before and It made me feel

cold.

It still does, I can't stand it in truth, but I can now appreciate what he has done for the world of animation,

some of his works are amazing such as one I watched the other day called dimensions of dialogue, although

gross and not one bit visually pleasing I found it very creative and resourceful and found myself admiring

the sheer volume of thought and effort that must have to go into his works.

so here is a clip from Alice as my historical piece below:

F-L-A-S-H!

For the past 2 weeks we have been looking at flash animation, although i must admit i am still completely in the dark about it, I have cs4 at home wheras we are using cs3 at school which doesn't help as the overall layout/look is quite different. I think i shall revert back to cs3 until i get the hang of it! 

So i feel very behind the rest of the group, as I still haven't come to grips with the software. If only we were given handouts to accompany the session, then i wouldn't need to spend so much time trying to take notes! I could do the work and forget about the notes! this is how it was done last year, (or the year before?) when we were inducted into photoshop- we were all given detailed step by step handouts that covered everything we were doing in that session!

Oh well, I wish i'd applied to be student rep now cause these are the sort of things i would be asking for cause I feel it would benefit the whole group, and it makes sense to have notes as reference, I hate being the only one taking notes also cause it makes me feel as though I am the thickest one who can't process data in my head so has to take notes! 

anyway i just wanted to post some animations I have been looking at which were doing primarily using flash.

this first one is a students first attempt at flash, I think it's prety cool! 

In this one below, which is another student animation, I like the way 

he/she has used transparency in the opening shot of the bushes parting 

and in the end where you see the gunslinger fade.

This last one here is from an animated show called "Broken Saints" which started

out as an internet series about the inter-twining and revolving lives of 4 people,

the series became so popular that the creators were given backing to have the entire

show recreated on dvd, they stuck to using flash but have tweaked the show here

and there.

The show has now won the sundance film festival award and is over 5 hours long.