Fundamentals of Interactive Media Evaluation

When given the brief for the interactive media unit we were given a choice to pick a fairy tale story from either Hans Christen Anderson or Bothers Grimm tales to base it on. My first idea was to base my project on the classic tale Rumpelstiltskin as I have heard the story many times when I was a child. For the few weeks after starting the unit leading up to Christmas we were given lessons in how to create scripting on Flash. As I felt little more confident using Flash from the animation unit I was quite interested in learning how to create simple buttons and games. This soon changed as the coding became much more complicated. I hated the fact that how one miner scripting error could alter everything you had typed in and to make one simple control or movement an absolute nightmare to create. As always what I did enjoy about the beginning of the unit is designing the characters for the Rumpelstiltskin story as I could hand draw them and just imagine them as what I thought them when I was younger. Instead of drawing up a storyboard I just wrote down my ideas for what I would of liked to include in my interactive tale. After looking at a few examples of games on the Internet such as crappy cat I decided to keep my thoughts simple, as I wanted to design the game mainly for a younger audience. These would just be easy multiple choices and click on buttons so that the story could be followed and understood.
After Christmas break I soon forgot a lot of the experimental scripting work and at times I tended to avoid working on this unit and focused on the others. When it came to continuing I separated the body parts of my characters into layers so I could create movement. Overall I do feel that I had spent too much time on this process, making to many parts complicated and really were not needed. I feel I should of focused more on the interactive side than the animation.
As I seriously struggled with the scripting I tried to create the backgrounds and animation work first to get out of the way. After getting the idea from the TV series Phone Jacker to keep things basic I decided that I would just use writing in speech bubbles and flapping mouths to tell the story. Instead of having voice sounds I would just half a medieval tune in the background repeating itself. When it eventually came to the coding I found it extremely confusing and became frustrated just over miner problems. At numerous times I needed help and felt like I was going nowhere with it. A huge difficulty was when creating a movement symbol and then afterwards trying to figure out how to make it into an interactive button. Although I encountered many problems, eventually I did learn how to create certain buttons and script them to go to different scenes. However I wouldn’t really like to continue interactive media in the near future as I found it very testing and lost interest to quickly.