Sk-etchbook

Overall I’m happy with my final piece, my project management and my progress both technical and conceptual. The final piece was by no means as complete as I would have liked but I feel it definite met the brief and was also an interesting work which, at a stretch, could be passed of as professional.

Firstly I have noticed vast improvements in my project planning, time and file management. I still need to work on a more strict system of definition, research & brainstorming, development & testing, refining & finalising but this system is certainly taking shape. A possible improvement would be to create some kind of way to collect market data to identify gaps and needs and get feed back, I’m thinking some kind of form linked to the back of my website would be good for this. I managed to get the project finished on time, handing in all process files & documents, the final piece is complete but I’d say it was definitely a beta version with scope for development, not perfect but acceptable. I still have time management issues as in previous projects, whereas I’m now thinking this is more caused by my perception of time ergo I assume I can do things in less time than it actually requires. The best way I can see of addressing this issue is to overestimate, allowing time for any errors or technical issues and I could also do with planning time out at an earlier stage in the project.

As far as the design goes I’m more than happy with the way the project looks. With the exception of the original arcade background and fists drawings, the stars and the music all the elements were created by me from scratch in a mixture of Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash. As in previous projects this boosts my confidence in using this software and doing so also enhances my conceptual capabilities as I’m more aware of what is and isn’t possible. As regarding improvements, the game screens aesthetics are my favourite they are perfect with the exception of the dithering on the title text which is present throughout the game. I tried to amend this problem but the only work arounds were to use GIFs (the files are PNG 24) and in doing this losing alpha transparency or importing directly from Illustrator and creating large file size. This problem didn’t occur when importing to other software so I’m guessing it is caused by the import settings. I wanted to change the red star on the intro screen for more comical pows & biffs etc but ran out of time for this apart form that (and the dither thing again) there are no other issues. There is most problems with the instructions screen. Creating realistic looking scrolling text was a nightmare, I did work this out eventually but as there is quite a bit of text you cant really read it properly, I believe there is a perspective text tool in CS3 but didn’t have time to wok this out. I also wanted to have another mc follow the text giving information about the characters in the game & the score for each one. Finally on this subject the sound design, this was a nightmare and was a subject I didn’t really consider early enough in the project. The sound files could do with some external editing but it took that long finding files, converting them then getting them to start & stop at the right times that I did not have time for this.

The technical aspect of the game is not what I originally wanted. Although the basic structure of Actionscript makes sense, cobbling it all together is still beyond me. I did want a scoreboard and winner/loser screens but as my original way of adding game variables wasn’t working I had to scrap this.

To sum up everything, I’m impressed with the final piece. There is loads of improvement to be made and my thought process still needs work but I can now see these more clearly and have a good idea of how to address the issues. In regards to the final piece I’m thinking as with the P2S brief I may have gone slightly overkill and maybe just the game screen would have satisfied the brief.