Brutal Entertainment - November 22
10-28-08
Final Project - Synchrony - week whatever it is, I’ve lost count
10-25-08
I have not posted anything regarding my final for too long now. Last time I had just sorted out my wireframes and since then I have been working non stop on visual design. One thing that it driving me crazy, is how hard it was for me to determine a style for my graphics. This is was the most challenging part for me and something I had not anticipated. I have honestly worked non stop for 3 weeks getting my graphics implemented into my flash.
After endless mockups of my graphic implementation I managed to settle on something I was happy with. The Synchrony game has a constant theme throughout when you play it, it has a blue digital field of graphics or technological lines, just like the green numbers and data like stuff from the matrix movies. I used that idea for my graphics and came up with the following. I used Cinema4D and modeled boxes and put beveled edges on them as well as textures.
I posted a few for you to see.
There is pretty much 1 weeks left for the project. I have a lot to do in a week but I am confident I can pull it all off effectively. I really want to get the graphics done in the next 2 days so I can back into the programming and fix all my bugs, and try to add more interactivity for the flash because that is the one thing that I am dissapointed in my project. There is a lot to do and the next week is going to be intense.
Final Project - Synchrony - Week 5 Retrospective
10-08-08
The past week I have been working in flash. I originally was going to have the main home page of my site in flash and run the other pages in HTML but after thinking really hard and the fact I am doing a programming focused project I decided to do all the pages in flash and load swf’s into my word press structure via pages. I started coding the other pages for my site and I was able to get the weapins page and environments page done. The weapons page shows the gun in the game and displays the 3 functions it has with mouse overs to show videos of the gun function. I also went on to code the environments page showing the location the game takes place and maps of the game levels.
I am at a part of the project where I need to make visual design choices and I am having some problems making those decisions. I worked all week on the flash pages and on Saturday I worked on my HTML theme and navigation so I could be happy showing Dougal my project. Saturday turned out to be a long unsuccessful day and I was unhappy with everything I got done. I was not happy with anything I did and had one of those horrible unproductive days. Sunday I returned to flash and continued actionscripting. I am now 120 hours into the project.
I met with Sebastien and Dougal and the meeting threw me off track a little. I went into the meeting asking for help with visual design and walked out creating wireframes for the site. I am now going to design the site for a 1600 x 1010 browser and my flash content will be 700 x 734. I have attached the pdf for my wireframes. Click on the link below to see.
Final Project - Synchrony moodboard / style guide
10-05-08
I mainly did this to show Doogle some reference when I tell him about my project so he can understand wha I need to do with graphic design choices.
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The Final is making me crazy
10-05-08
I have been sitting in front of a computer for 10 hours today. I did something besides flash so I could stay sane.
Final Project - Synchrony - Week 4 Retrospective
09-29-08
Last week I made my HTML navigation for my site. I am now considering running everything through Wordpress to make life much easier.
Last week I also had made a lot progress on the flash side of things. I had a rough framework of my homepage with the media player loading in pictures but had problems loading in FLV’s. This week I got help from Brett and re organized my XML to load in different file extensions according to what asset type I tagged in my XML. I now have video being loaded into my media player therefore i am now 75% to having it work entirely.
I planned to work all weekend in HTML and get my pages all done however after wasting time and thinking Wordpress would be better trying to figure out some CSS problems I moved onto Flash and canned the idea of doing HTML. I decided to start implementing some graphics into my interface so I could stand looking at it and not thinking it looked like crap so I made all the buttons and skinned the player making it look web 2.0ish. I looks really well now and I am very happy with what I got done. I spent all night Friday, all day Saturday and some of Sunday working on this, altogether 15 hours of work this week. My goal for the next week is to figure out the HTML side of things and have my project visually tuned so I can show Doogle and feel comforatble showing him where I am at.
I met with my advisor Ryan on Friday after the slam. We both talked about my planning and discussed re adjusting my work back schedule. He convinced me to get my HTML done on the weekend like I mentioned but that turned into Flash. I am really excited with Flash right now and I am finally starting to feel good about my confidence with it.
Final Project - Synchrony - Week 3 Retrospective
09-22-08
I have now started coding for the Synchrony Site. I met with my advisor and we decided that before I start production I should plan out a work back schedule so I can track my progress and follow the hours each task takes me to complete. A work back schedule lists all the tasks in my backlog and plans out set dates I need to have those tasks completed along with the hours and days they will require. Planning this out was such a big help in this project and has me more confident with regards to where I am with it. I am so happy Ryan had me do it and I follow it everyday so I know I’m on track of things.
I decided to start production with the main page of the website, It is by far the most demanding part of the site and it made sense to get started with the heaviest element. It requires that I code a media player that will display picture, video and mp3’s files. It will have 4 tabs that control a thumbnail preview showing game screen shots, concept art, game videos, trailers, presentation videos and songs from the game.
So far I have spent 22 plus hours with the coding and have successfully loaded in the screen shots and the concept art externally using XML. I am having problems right now bringing in videos loaded from XML and loading thumbnails to accompany those videos. Once I figure that part out I can move onto loading in the mp3’s. I have allowed myself 30 days to complete this part of the project and with 7 days into this task I am quite happy with my progress, in some ways I am ahead of myself but in others I am behind and it is quite intimidating approaching almost the half way point.
I was lazy and just updated my backlog. Planning is the most important process in this project and if you do not plan out your actions and organize yourself you are going to fail. For all you dd12’s and 13’s you will see, you will see! So take my advice.
At the last meeting with my advisor Ryan I was starting to freak out and was getting scared to how the progress of everything was going. I was not happy with the hours I had tracked, at the time I had 40 hours into the project and didn’t feel I was where I needed to be, this causes stress, and stress causes a lot of shit to happen, a place you do not want to be. At 40 hours in I had everything I needed to start production, so on that level things felt great, but like I mentioned the homepage for the site had to be conquered and I was at the bottom of the hill looking way up at the top of the mountain.
We all had meetings with Sebastien to discuss where we were in the project. I had stuff to show and I felt good with what I had, which was the beginning stages of my media player showing pictures being loaded with XML and thumbnails to select. I went on to discuss the visual choices of the site and it lead to Sebastien suggesting I make a wire frame and measure out in pixels exactly where everything should be positioned. I left the meeting feeling like that approach was taking me backwards and later in the day I had a meeting with Brett so I waited to discuss where I was in the project with him because Sebastien had me confused. Brett and I discussed how exactly the approach for developing the site should be. He eventually explained to me that I should build parts of the site in actionscript and use HTML to achieve the rest. This made a lot of sense and helped me with confidence in getting this done and also lightened the scope of the project making me more comfortable to where I was and what needed to be done. I met that afternoon with Ryan and we discussed building the site with HTML and determined we would follow through with that approach as it would make my scope more focused.
I spent the weekend working on my project. I worked all night Friday, all day Saturday and all day Sunday. In those 3 days I put 20 hours into the project. I spent Friday and Saturday doing actionscript coding and now have my thumbnail scroller controlled by buttons rather than the mouse, and I aplided tweens to control movements of the thumbnails. I am quite happy I got this part figured out and I went on to load in flv’s. I had problems loading in flv’s through XML with the thumbnails So I moved onto making my main navigation through HTML. I spent all day Sunday doing the navigation for the site and feel really good in what I got accomplished and that brings me currently to where I am.
Final Project - Synchrony - Project Plan
09-18-08
Click above to open. This is my completed project plan for my final project. I put a lot of time and effort into it and it turned out to be very solid.
Alpha Trion - Myspace Update - New Artwork
09-15-08
I just worked on material for my band and I completely revamped our myspace. Click here to check out ALPHA TRION
We used to be Muffgoat but Muffgoat tranformed into ALpha Trion. We have a new drummer as well as a second guitarist and we started using 8 string guitars tuned to low F and writing completely new and different material from anyone else.
Final Project - Synchrony - Week 2 Retrospective
09-10-08
I started this post to discuss my final project and reflect upon the process I make throughout the next 11 weeks.
I asked for an external brief from Sebastien and Brett with regards to creating a flash website. I came to VFS to learn XHTML and Flash and chose to do so for my final project. My advisor for this project is Ryan Eves who is a flash developer for Zeroes2Heros and he will be mentoring me throughout the project for the weeks to come. Like I mentioned before I asked for an external brief because I did not know what to focus the site on or even what subject to do a site on. After some discussion it was said that I would do a flash website for a video game based off an IDD that was given to me from Ryans Betts, an Interaction Designer at Blast Radius.
I looked at 3 games from the Game Design program at VFS. After seeing and playing the games I chose the game “Synchrony” because of its elaborate gameplay and beautiful detailed environments. The game had the most material to work with and since I am showcasing a game for a marketing website Synchrony was by far the best choice.
The past 2 weeks I have been communicating back and forth with the Jet Theory team who made Synchrony and it has been quite stressful. I have been collecting assets from them in order to get all the materials I need in order to carry out this website. I have gathered screen shots, in game videos, game trailers, mp3 songs and concept art as well as a copy of the game. I received assets from them but not nearly enough to have full content for the website.
I downloaded a program called FRAPS which is free to download and is an image/video capturing program that will take screen shots and in game videos of any PC game. I used FRAPS to get all the screen shots I needed as well as in game videos and cinematics. FRAPS is such a wicked program and I suggest trying it to anyone who wants to capture footage from a game on your computer. This program saved me so much time and I was able to gather all the content I needed for this project which takes me to the IDD.
When I first recieved the IDD I was told it was designed to be used for a flight simulation game. The way the information architecture was arranged had conflict with the materials I had to work with from Synchrony. The IDD was well designed but had to be adjusted on a few levels to work with Synchrony so in the past week I have restructured the IDD and modified it to work with this game. Now I can begin development with actionscript coding. YAY ! The fun begins.
