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.

Colour Research

As I am looking to aim my project towards children, the colours that I would be looking to use would need to be very bright and make use of the primary colours as children react better to primary colours due to their eyes not being properly developed. I used Kuler to have a look at different colour schemes under the search option "children" and picked the best colour schemes from that selection.

This colour scheme is very bright and each of the colours and vibrant as well as being very different from each other which makes this colours scheme very distinguishing.

This colour scheme is a slightly more dull that the previous colour scheme but each of the colours are very distinguishing. The colours are not as bright as I would like but still fit into the theme I am looking at.

This colour scheme is just as bright as the first one but the use of red is different. The use of the red is placed in the pink and purple colours rather than just a plain red.

After looking at all the colour schemes above, I have decided that I definitely wanted to go down the route of very bright colours so I put the word "bright" into the search option on Kuler and below are some of the best results.

 This colour scheme makes use of a darker blue which is different than they one that we have seen above. The other colours are very similar to what we have already seen though.

Quite different to what we have seen. Does not make use of the primary colours really but each of the colours are bright and interesting but I feel there is not much                    
distinction between each of them

Again a fairly different colour scheme but the colours are still very bright. As with the one above, I feel there is not much variation in the colours here as they all feel very "similar"





I am deciding to use this colour scheme because it has a lot of variety and makes good use of the primary colours with variations of them. The colours are bright and would work well in a children's themed interactive video.

Target Audience Research

As we all know, TV has become a very large part of everyone's life and with this children's programmes are very popular with, well, children. There are many programmes out there all trying to teach children manners and good morals.
The Tweenies is an example of children's programming. All of the characters are very colourful as well as the studio set that it is filmed in. There are sometimes puzzles for the children to solve on screen which means  that the tweenies engages children both visually and intelectually which is a reason why it is such a huge success.

The teletubbies is another example of children's programming. This show gets children moving by joining in with dancing and singing as well as doing puzzles. This show has become one of the most popular programme on television for children.

 Children's games also follow a certain style. The box design always seems to be the same with a large bright letters and the graphics on the box are comic-like which attracts children into buying it. The game itself is very simple but amusing to children as it is easy to play. The colours on the actual game are again very colourful with no dark or dull colours as they are very boring colours to children.

Competition Research

Usborne has been around since 1973 and specialise in children's books. One of their most successful series was the Puzzle Adventures. These books contained bright images and challenging puzzles for children to do. The books stories always seem to follow very interesting adventures, specifically adventures that children would enjoy such as outer space, pirates or western.
Each of the puzzles seem to contain lots of different object along with a story line. Example puzzles are things like matching objects to owners, finding objects or mazes. Each of these are good examples of puzzles that are interesting to children as well as being simple enough for them to be able to solve.

There are a lot of "typical" puzzle books out there that usually involve large colourful letters in order to grab the attention of children in stores etc. There is a minimal amount of white space and there are no dull or dark colours used. The puzzles inside also seem to revolve around finding things and matching objects but can contain a vast amount of different puzzles such as spot the difference or simple number puzzles.



On the right is a simple puzzle that has been devised for use in a puzzle book. It may be in black and white but that makes it no less interesting. There is plenty of illustration going on in order to keep children entertained. The puzzle in this example is to get the pirate to the treasure but he is only able to touch the squares with even numbers on them. This is a good example of how a simple puzzle can be made into something educational.

My Brief

Aims
I am going to create a visual journey which is aimed at children. The piece is going to be both fun as well stimulating as the journey will take the form of a puzzle type adventure. That piece will be very visual with lots of objects and colours in each of the pictures which is engaging to children and the puzzles will need to be simple in order for children to complete them.

Target Audience
As stated above, my target audience is children. I will be looking to create something for children between 4 and 9 years old and specifically school children. At this age range, most children have not been in school very long amd education is new and exciting to them so a puzzle game would be interesting to them as it provides fun as well as being something stimulating and education.

Competition
Puzzle books for children is a very large market with a vast amount of different puzzle books and games out there. I will look at the successful competition who have perhaps been around for a long time as I will be able to see what it is they do that allows children to enjoy their books or games and certainly what has kept them in business for so many years.

Map

The route in red is slightly shortened than the video below. The beginning of the route is Rosebery Avenue and the final point is the bowling green but could also be the rose garden which is right next to it.

Location Research

Images

This is a wide open area with plenty of areas to add characters hidden behind bushes and trees. Picture itself is very dark so may need to be brightened.

Similar to the one above closer as well as being brighter, would be better to use than the one above as places to hide characters are better on this image.

Narrow path but not a lot of places to hide anything or create puzzles. Could be used as a story page only.

Very bright image and a lot of foliage going on, could be used quite well for a puzzle.

Good open area to create a puzzle but also has a few places to hide characters as well.

Same as above, much more open but less places to hide characters.

Again, very open area but quite a few areas to hide characters as well, 

Lots of modern day things in this image, looks a bit different from the rest of the images so probably will not be used.

Very similar to the narrow path image with not a lot of room for puzzle etc. Could be used as a story page.

Again, quite narrow but this does have the potential for a lot of hidden characters and puzzles.

A good one for hiding characters as part of a puzzle but not a lot of room for anything else.

Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvNumGRsbaA

Interpretation of Brief

Objective:

To create an interactive experience of a normal journey that you can make. Using different medias, we must turn this mundane journey into something more interesting through different sounds and images. This can be done in a variety of ways, but must give a different outlook on the journey than normal.

Audience:

The journey must be interesting to a vast audience or different age ranges and backgrounds as the audience of people that are interested in interactive media are not limited by age or gender. It must also be fairly unique to grab the attention of this audience.

Requirements:
Find an location and create an interactive experience within a half mile radius of that location. Develop ideas and concepts in a sketchbook.

Initial Ideas

Ideas

1. Using a series of photographs. Each photograph can be clicked to go forward but other photographs to the sides which when clicked on, zoom in on that photograph. There would be interactive objects in the world that may appear normal but would not be. For example, a billboard that when clicked would become a tunnel that provides a shortcut to another area.

2. A game style adventure which involves you having to pick up objects or other things in order to advance. Could do it as a video or in the same style as the above with a series of photographs that you can click to advance or look about.

3. A puzzle style adventure specifically designed for children. There would be a challenge for them to overcome in each area such as finding an object or matching object to people or other things.

4. Text-like adventure that gives you different choices and options once you reach certain points. Could also include pictures with puzzles as part of this adventure.

Chosen Idea
I have decided to do the puzzle style adventure because images can be easily editted to include other objects allowing me to put more into the picture. The objects can be used for puzzles and children's puzzles are always more visual than normal puzzles allowing me to utilise those objects into puzzles easily.