Researching and exploring ideas

I did research on interactive animations/games. The first was interactive flash game called "Another Small Favor".
Its a adventure game. In which you have to complete objectives. Game is controlled with mouse.

The first thing that impressed me about this game was nice artwork of backgrounds and character itself.  The graphics are the mix of bitmap and vector graphics.  Also the movement of the main character is smooth.There is a map and quite a lot of places you can explore and the audio of game is pretty good.

The only flaws of this game is that there was no introduction to game mechanics so its hard to figure out what you have to do at first and there is a lack of action in this game. All in all its nicely created game but it doesn't have lasting appeal as the whole game is the same every time you play through.

I came across a strange interactive animation.

The first thing you see after opening this animation is a man holding some kind of cup and mixing something that is inside. The man is bitmap graphics and is only black and white, his movement is made from 2 frames.
After pressing on him he starts blowing a bubble which then just flys away or you could hover your mouse over the bubble and then it pops and the man just comes back to his previous state. This animation probably wanted to come out as really artistic but it came out as really boring.

I didn't like the background of an animation because it looks like green notebook paper and black and white character doesn't look like he belongs in there because of too much contrast. This animation could have been done better if they included more interactivity for example if you could control the direction in which bubble will be flying.

I found a game called Icarus. The game's objective is to fly as far as you can before you power runs out.

The game is done using vector graphics. The movements in game looks smooth but the colours of the game are too bleak because there is no "strong" colours and it just looks like that there is a white transparent layer on the whole screen. Also the game play itself has a few bad sides for example:

 when you flying down game screen doesn't follow you so basicly you can's see you character  and also the game is bugged.

after a few minutes of playing everything just disappeared from the screen.

After research we got a project to create an interactive animation for Plymouth Aquarium website. Animation has to be realistic. All the fish that is going to be in animation has to look realisticly if they going to move try to make fish move like if they were real. Right after I was introduced to this project I came up with an idea to create animation by drawing frame by frame and the whole animation would be from the first person perspective so that person who is watching would feel more like he is interacting with everything. The action would start on the boat in the middle of ocean, the character then would dive into the ocean and swim to the seabed where interaction part would start.
At first we been devided into groups of three. In group we decided that I will be responsible for doing all the work in flash and the other team members going to do research and graphics. Then we had to go to aquarium and do some research on what fish we are going to use in our animation and how those fish move and behave.
After visit to aquarium we had to decide how and what fish we are going to use for the interactive part of our animation. After some group discussion we decided that in our animation we going to include: hermit crab, lobster, anemone, starfish, strarry smooth hound shark, a school of fish and also we are going to include a mini game where you have to find peaces of trash in the bottom of the ocean and remove in by clicking on it.

Developing an idea for interaction work

Working within constraints

After we came up with the idea for the project I started working on it immediately. I started with drawing boat that is floating in a sea/ocean. wave animation was created by drawing the frame by frame and boat movement by tweening it.

It took about 8 seconds for animation to reach diveing part of animation. About at that point we were told the actual size that our animation has to be 750x480 so I had to redraw parts of animation. After  boat and diving stages were finished my team mate finished drawing seabed, fish and trash. I imported all the images to flash and decided where everything will be. After that I started scripting. After i finished scripting there was 166 lines of script so I decided not to write all the script in my blog.
The last thing that was left was to make still image of shark and school of fish appear as they are swimming. I achieved this effect by using puppet warp on Photoshop.

Completing the work

Now that the original idea for interactive animation was completed there was still time to improve it. First thing I decided to add to animation was loading bar so that animation would run smoothly even for people with slow internet and also added bubbles on loading screen that you can pop, this way you can keep viewer interested in animation even when it takes a while to load.

After loading bar finishes loading explore button appears which starts animation.

And the second thing I added was counter which showed how much trash there is left on seabed.

After I uploaded my finished work on swf file hosting site my animation loading bar stoped working so I had to remove it in order for it to play.
This is the finished result http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1308741677

Reviewing your own work

After finishing animation we had a to present animation to Plymouth aquarium employee. A week later we found out that our team's animation well be on aquarium's website.
While making this animation a learnt a lot about flash so if I would be doing this animation all over again I would do some changes for example I would change the way I animated sea waves, try to make vector graphics more detailed and now that I have better knowledge of coding on flash I would make animation more interactive.
All in all I think animation was a success because it took second place and will be going on website, also because I managed to create animation just like I planed it in original idea and finishing it before deadline.