Evaluation

Strengths

Location: I think that the location I chose was very good as it contained a lot of variety whilst being quite similar. There was a lot of grassy areas with plenty of trees which made my woodland characters fit in very well. The location was also very interesting with plenty to look at which made the journey quite interesting just by itself.


Characters: I think my characters were very well done, they looked very cartoon-like and looked professional enough to be used for the puzzle adventure. I thought that they all fit together pretty well with each other as well as with the locations that I have selected.

Navigation: I feel the navigation system was well done as it allows the puzzle adventures to also be used in a book form so it is not just limited to a digital experience.

Weaknesses

Backgrounds: I would have loved if I could have spent more time on the backgrounds, one idea I was thinking off was by tracing over the entire background and making it very hand drawn and cartoony but this would take up a lot of time that I didn't have as I would need to develop my arts skills more before being able to attempt something like this. 


More Characters: If I had more time, I would have spent a lot for time on developing and creating new characters for the puzzle adventures, if the adventures were to be developed fully, more characters would need to be developed anyway.


Self Assessment on Skills Developed

Art Skills
As I spent some time drawing my characters on this project, I developed my art skills slightly by taking my time with my drawings. Althought I did not do a lot of drawing, I felt like my drawing skills have improved by attempting to draw things that I haven't before.

Adobe Illustrator
I have spent some time on illustrator before but not a whole lot so during this project all of the characters that I designed digitally were done using Adobe Illustrator. I have learnt a lot of new things for illustrator as I have only really used it for typography and smaller designs before but nothing with as much detail as I had done on this project.

Research Methods

Colour
I looked at a lot of different colours which tied in with my research on target audience. I looked at a lot of variations of the same sort of primary colours as children seem to respond well to those colours and during my research I found that they were used a lot in most children's programmes and other puzzle books so I looked at colour scheme that focussed primarily on those colours.

Interacivity
I looked at various interactivity that children come in contact with such as television programmes and puzzle books to give me ideas on what they like. Children enjoy doing things that they can interact with, even child's programmes are interactive with the characters on screen asking them to solve things to give that feeling that the children are taking part in the show. I tried to make the puzzle adventure as interactive as possible.


Time Management
My time management originally wasn't great but once I set out a timeplan and started working to it, I got through my work fairly quickly. The work was done at a fairly consistent rate without it piling up too much which gave me plenty of time to think and complete the work.

Were the original aims met?
From my concepts, I felt that the adventure met all the aims that I wanted. I made the whole thing feel like a book with the navigation of the interactive adventure and the characters and puzzles were well suited for the target audience that I had in mind. I would have loved to have worked on the backgrounds a lot more and make them more child friendly but unfortunately time constraints stopped me from doing so.

Potential Further Applications

Smartphone

As the navigation for the puzzle adventure is all based around clicking and dragging the corners, this could be easily translated to work for an iPhone or Android as it will just need the mouse input changed to recognise the finger instead. The high retina screen would also make it easy to complete the challenges, even giving the option to zoom in and out of the image to make it easier to spot things.

New Locations/Characters


As the backgrounds are just images with a few filters included, it would be easy to include new locations with new puzzles. New characters could also be added along with new locations as well quite easily as their images are just placed onto the locations. This could give more variety and could make new and interesting puzzle adventures allowing a series of the adventures or a continuation.

Final Images

Loading Screen

The loading screen is simple, it will just have a plain background colour and text. The loading bar is very simple and just contains bars that will keeping adding at certain percentages and the numbers at the side will keep going up until 100%.

As the loading screen was very plain, I wanted to just use the colours in my colour scheme but none of the colours seemed to work all that well.

Final Image

The third loading screen seemed to be almost there but not quite so instead I added a slight gradient with orange. I kept the text all the same colours rather than being different as it was above and it seemed to be simple but effective.


Story and Instructions

I wanted a start screen that explained what the story was about and contained instructions on how to navigate through the pages but it seemed very plain so I decided to add a character to the front to make it more interesting. The text needed to be short and not all displayed on the page at the same time so that children do not lose attention so I split the text up and made a simple click to continue naviagation for the interactivity so they can read and get onto the next part. This could also be done on the main pages as well where text may be too long.

My final image follows the style of the main pages with the story being in the simple white box with instructions on what to do. The background was given a simple film grain with increased brightness to make it lighter. I added the character to the left as without it, it seemed very plain and boring which would not appeal to younger children.

Main Page

The main pages needed to contain the characters that I had designed as well as the story and puzzles. I did the same effect to the background picture as I did with the start page which made the image brighter and better to look at. I included the characters that I had designed in the image and place them at various points in keeping with the puzzle. I placed them behind objects and not just in front of them to make the puzzle more interesting. 

Transition

I wanted the transition to be just like a book with the user being able to pull the corners and "turn" the page just as they would with a real book. When they pulled it, it would show the new page underneath and it would also allow them to go back and forward between the pages easily.

Storyboard

Character Design

I looked at creating different animals that are found around the woodland areas as the walk itself has a lot of trees and other greenery and they all seemed to fit in the most with everything else. I went for simple animals as children would be able to relate to them.







 The bird I decided to keep grey and I thought it was quite neutral and quite a common colour for a bird. I used the different shades of grey to keep it simple but made the beak orange in keeping with the common colours associated with a bird.

I made the bear big and round to make him more friendly looking. The brown colours were again used in keeping with a common colour and used different shades for different areas. The brown was also chosen as it is a commonly used colour for teddy bears which keeps with the friendly look to the bear.

I wanted to create a cartoon child to add something to my initial story page rather than just having text as I thought that would be fairly boring to look at. I just wanted to draw the head rather than the whole body as I felt that it wasn't needed.

I tried different colours from my colour scheme on the main character but none of the other colours worked as well as the blue and red on it so I tried various combinations until I finally found the colour scheme that worked below.

Chosen Concept

I have chosen concept 1 as I like the whole story idea, it gives some depth to the journey by making it interesting and not just a collection of images with puzzles attached to them. Each page would contain a puzzle, but I would add the puzzles in from concept 2 and 3 as well with maths and more challenging puzzles to make the game more interesting as there would be a wide variety of puzzles to complete.

Concepts

Concept 1

This concept follows a story and acts more like a book with different pages continuing the story. Each of the pages will have a part of the story and a puzzle for the children to solve. Most of the puzzles will be finding hidden things but some other small puzzles might also be there. The adventure will be mainly based around the whole book idea and navigation through the pages would be done via the corners which you can flick over and turn the page just like a real book.

Concept 2 

Based around a much more variation in the puzzles with each one being unique and different. This one seems to be a bit more interesting as it will contain more puzzles. Each page will have a puzzle that the child must complete in order to continue.

Concept 3

This concept is very dark, it makes the animals and other objects stick out well and makes them easy to see but may be a bit too dark for children to look at and may cause them to lose interest easier. The puzzles in this game would be more revolved around maths involving counting and adding/subtracting.