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.