Sk-etchbook

I started out by reading through the brief a couple of times to get a solid idea of what was wanted then by reading through the fables. As I read through the fables I highlighted all the elements which could be taken away and included developed into interactive elements eg. characters, environments and objects. Once I had done this I started looking at websites and flash projects to see examples of what flash does well, what styles suit the medium best and what concepts already exist in the marketplace so as not to produce "just another flash product" and ensure originality.

I then returned to the brief and started brainstorming, at this point I had still not decide on a specific fable to develop deciding rather to do this once I had an idea I really liked. Originally I wanted to produce an RPG game utilizing simple graphic elements. I started playing around with the CS software to get a good idea of my technical boundaries and limitation. My fist flash test was the original intro screen which was to be a character selection screen. Pretty early on in the project I decided not to proceed with this route as I realised I was been too strict in my aspirations, trying too much to stick to something which I knew flash (and I) could produce and also because the simple graphics & RPG game were common flash creations.

By this point I firmly had in my mind which fable I was going to reinvent, The Tortoise and The Hare. My second idea was to produce a game based on Paper, Scissors, Stone. I felt this was more original and I had also decided to include more complicated graphics.

I then continued experimenting, I already had a vague idea of what I could do in Flash, Photoshop & Illustartor as I was pulling in experience from the Lynda.com titles however I've realised knowing technical limitations of software & applying it creatively are a million miles apart. My earlier experiments in Flash were more a trial of style, the route one was the test of the simple graphic idea, I decided I didn't like this as it was too common and uninteresting. There was a small issue with shape hints, I could of fixed this but dumped the project so there was no point.

The next few experiments were more to access Actionscript abilities, breaking down code snippets and reapplying them to files to make sure I understood how they were working. This helped me to formulate in my head how the game could be coded and redirected the game format to take on more fruit machine characteristics.

I had decided on how I wanted the game to look and after researching for images and pictures on the internet I want about having a good old play round in PS & AI to see what I liked and disliked.

The rest of the project proceeded like this. Having an idea, playing around with it and developing it. The main problems I encountered were with converting file formats and actionscript. I had to scrap the original functionality as after building a beta interface the actionscript which worked by loading external image files specified by a text file with a random number attached to specify the file. This didn't work and was pulling in a ghost file called NaN which didn't exist???
Soo I worked out a different way of creating the functionality using MCs, this meant I couldn't do the scoring the way I had planned by assigning a number to each variable then using if logic to add a point to the highest or lowest number until a score was reached then you were redirected to a win/lose screen. I worked out I could probably still achieve this using the frame numbers instead of stored variable data but did not have the time so stuck to just producing a working game.

I tried to also keep a journal of my thought process by scribling down what I was thinking as I went along, saving files in folders as they were created and labeling the folders and files in a way which explained what they were and also colour coding them.