Finally finished! evaluation

I came in this morning still close to tears everytime I had to tell someone what happened to my work!

I have spent the whole day with an old file getting it back up to scratch, I actually thought it would take me 3 days again, but have done it in a day, the only issue i had was with the text, i must have wasted hours trying different things out, as in my lost copy i had the text fading in and out etc but on this one it wasn't having it, the speech bubbles were fading out but then the text would just remain on the screen! I converted the text to graphics, movie clips, it still would not work, i tried having them on seperate layers then on the same, and still nothing.

In the end I just put a blank keyframe after the fade out, so the text disappears, so what you get is a nice fade with the speech bubbles and boxes, but the text remains then abruptly vanishes, it is not too noticeable, maybe casual viewers wouldn't notice, but I did want this work to be at the best that i could get it as I consider it a portfolio piece.

Now at the stage of publishing the document, I got stuck with a button, it had text on it and it wasn't allowing you to click anywhere where the text was, after consulting another student found out that it was because the text was set at "dynamic text" and it should have been on "static text" after changing this i found it worked perfect!

I just wish i'd realized it was that earlier! I did think about doing it again, but it would mean about another half hours messing around and I have had enough! I don't think it is bad enough to be a problem as it's just a minor, it's not even something alot of people will notice, it will just annoy me!

there are other issues, for example the first button has a pen mark at the side of it, but as i don't know what stage it was put there it would be impossible to go back and undo it, and i am not about to create the whole button again, as it was time-consuming, contains movie clips etc.

I cannot delete the pen mark from anywhere so that will just have to stay.

the only other issue I have, (besides the mushroom kingdom scene with the jumping mushrooms and the graveyard scene with the sound and back button mentioned in earlier posts) is the trees in the first 2 scenes, there is a slight jump as the trees are on seperate layers, and are different sizes in each scene, I had to do this by eye so it was very tedious and that is the best I could get it.

Other than that I am very pleased with the finished outcome! I feel very confident about this project and feel it is one of strongest so far, my last flash project pales in comparison to this one! although that doesn't mean I don't appreciate what I learnt from it, I found it exciting to see my work "move" which has always been my obsession, ever since I first discovered "stop motion" which is rather tedious, with flash however you can tween movements so it's less tedious in that department, but of course it has it problems, if you can remember to back up your work literally every 10 minutes onto various volumes then you have a winner!

I just did not expect my brand new macbook to completely crash and brake down the way it has!

I really had fun with this project despite the frustrations and amount of time it took up, but I know that the next time I do anything like this it will be alot easier, thus alot faster and less frustrating, well flash will always be frustrating but when you are confident with it and know it in and out it makes it easier to deal with any problems, I would like for that to happen one day for me.

I did not stick to the brief with this one in the sense that I did not use a Brothers grimm tale, I did spend a few weeks (or should i say waste?) looking at various brothers grimm tales, I settled on Hansel and Gretal because the 2 other stories I would have liked were taken and I did not want the same story as anybody else, so I was stuck in a rut to be honest, and couldn't even see myself finishing it! I really would have liked to have made up my own story, that way it would have been more fun for me and I could have been a bit more personal with it.

Of course that Is exactly what I did in the end after seeing another student had done that and then getting Anna's permission, (however that other student has since changed his work to follow the brief) therefore I shouldn't lose anything for doing my own story.

The idea came from a dream I had and just other bits and bats that are in my head, for example although it doesn't look like it, my inspiration for the artwork/style came from a game called: "Okami", I love the quick sketchy style, and the bold inked outlines, so I tried to implement that in my own drawings.

From this brief I think I could see myself doing this type of thing for a living, I really like taking my work that one step further from being a static image to something that moves and then to something that is interactive.

I would like to continue with flash based content and make some more mini-games and interactive story's in my own time and this is something that I will definitely be doing more of.

I have completely turned this around from my first idea which was to create a dark and moody tale aimed at tim burton fans- probably 15 upwards, but the final result is colorful and friendly and aimed more at younger children, I did this because I feel I have neglected my own children to some degree to get this project done (and all my work done all the time) so in a way this was something that I could also give back to them. There is of course still one dark scene in there, it just wouldn't be "me" if that wasn't there!

I am happy with my finished piece besides some minor flaws, and would like to get my own website so that I can have it on there as part of an online portfolio, I now feel alot more confident in flash and action-scripting, which I thought impossible when i first experienced it but after getting used to it it's not that bad and i am positive that i will become alot more adept in using it along the way. 

I have definitely learnt alot from this module, both self-taught and taught in class, this has been my favorite module so far because i enjoyed the freedom i had to create my own world as such as that is what i like to do.

I really appreciate the one on one time that I had with Annabeth aswell during this brief, I gained alot of insight from them, even more so than I did in the regular sessions, and feel it would have been extremely difficult to finish without that.

drag and drop script

queen.onPress = function() {

this.startDrag(true);

updateAfterEvent();

};

queen.onRelease = function() {

this.stopDrag();

if (this.hitTest(greens)) {

gotoAndPlay("greens over", "greenstart");

}

if (this.hitTest(reds)) {

gotoAndPlay("reds over", "redstart");

}

if (this.hitTest(talls)) {

gotoAndPlay("talls over", "tallstart");

}

if (this.hitTest(pinks)) {

gotoAndPlay("pinks over", "pinkstart");

}

  

if (this.hitTest(shrooms)) {

gotoAndPlay("shrooms over", "shroomstart");

}

};

Action-scripting Interactive brief

so now i have found this one: 

queen.onPress = function(){

startDrag(this,true)

} 

queen.onRelease = function(){

this.stopDrag();

}

which seems to work so far but when i click on the queen without dragging her she will continue to move down slighty each time i click! so if i were to just click on and off of the movie clip of the queen it will eventually move to the bottom of the screen without even being dragged!

little bit jarring....

now how do i do the next bit? i want a different outcome depending on where she is dropped but i'm not sure what to do at all? 

just found out that why my clip may be moving like that, in one of the scripts i tried the word false was in there which means the mouse position will be locked where it was when the clip was first clicked on, and true which was on anna's script always locks the mouse pointer in a central position.

i prefer the false method but i don't know where to put it in my script! ?

oh how silly of me! it has true right there in the script!  I have just changed this to false and the movement is much better.

found another piece of code to make it smoother, the update after event code, which i am sure was on one of the codes i tried already? but why didn't any of them work? 

I found something about using components which looks good, you can drag an item onto another and a message appears at the bottom of the screen, what is says will depend on where you put it, but I can't seem to find components on flash? i found the component inspector but it just says select a component instance to edit its parameters, bindings or schema in this panel.

erm what the hell is all that?

and what's the difference between creating the drag drop on the frame or on the instance?

} 

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!

The Treesprite and the Mushroom queen storyboards

they are the wrong way around so the bottom one is the first! the top is just some buttons designs.

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!

Newer flash designs

Here are some newer re-vamped designs! however they have been converted to raster graphics to be displayed so still have a rough edge, the original vector images are neat and clear.

Woodsprite or Treesprite Old design

Old photoshop design for my Treesprite, it has since been neatened up on Flash as I prefer to draw on flash than Illustrator. these are awful! I'm so glad I re-drew them! thank god working with symbols and movie clips is so simple on Flash! because you only have to edit the symbol and it will change everywhere on the timeline! so no messing about altering every single keyframe you have the graphic in!

CATAPILLARS FOR MY FLASH INTERACTIVE TALE

Hansel and Gretel character designs

some ideas for my interactive tale about how i want it to look, i've been thinking of using black and white photography with hand-drawn illustration over it like so!

I can't draw though so I might just search books and the web for images I can use, which I'm sure will be fine as this isn't a drawing brief! these are not my images either, I copied them from a book, but if I could draw I would like my characters to look similar to this.

I don't know why my writing is underlined? there is no option to turn it off, it happens whenever I upload an image first and then attempt to type after it?

Pictures of inspiration for "tales" interactive brief