Final Major Project (Independent Practice)
Brief
The brief for this module was to consider one or a variety of professional directions within commercial web design, for example corporate identity, advertising, editorial and promotional web design, and structure a project proposal to reflect this.
Development Blog
View my final major project development blog for updates on the game.
Evaluation
Overall, I am happy with the final outcome and feel I have achieved the goals I set at the beginning of the module. I have found the project challenging and feel I have learned a lot from it; my understanding of Actionscript has greatly improved and by comparing my designs from the earlier stages of the project to the final designs I can see that my design skills have also improved. My main goal was to make a site which children would find entertaining and after carrying out user testing I feel I have fulfilled this goal.
My organisational and time keeping skills were much better than in previous projects I have carried out. I worked closely to the schedule I set at the beginning of the project but at times I spent longer on certain parts of the project due to difficulties with coding or spending more time improving the visual aspects of the game.
However, I could have been more organised with the project by following naming conventions and writing all variable, movie clip and text box names down to avoid confusion by referring to the wrong variable names or by accidently overwriting movie clips, etc.
Although I have benefited greatly from working independently and solving most problems I encountered by myself, I have learned that asking for guidance from colleagues can be beneficial by saving time and providing information that I cannot find online.
I feel that many improvements could be made to the project. Animation is an important element in children’s games; I think the game would benefit from more animations and better integration of the character’s (Pip’s pals). Additionally, I think the game needs a story element to it to bring the town and characters to life.
The user would feel more involved in the game if they had the ability to customise the heads up display by being able to change colours and patterns and by allowing the user to dress up Pip in accessories such as a hat, shoes or bowtie. These choices could then be saved in the database so that when the child returns it looks exactly how they left it when they last logged out.
Because each child learns at a different pace and a three year old has different abilities to a five year old, I would like to add the ability to change the difficulty of the games so that the users do not lose interest due to the difficulty level being too low or too high.
If I was to start the project again I would spend more time planning out each game before coding them up. I would also spend more time coding at the beginning of the project and leave the graphics until towards the end of the project since I find the coding to be the most challenging aspect of the game creation process.
The game could be expanded by adding more games and prizes to keep the game fresh and interesting. A profit could be made to keep the site running by selling merchandise featuring characters from the game such as stuffed toys or bags. The game could reach a wider audience if it was also turned into an app for the iPad since many parents buy educational games for their children.
Stories from or related to the game could be turned into illustrated books and personalised with the user’s nickname or code inside and short animated videos could be created to spread the word on YouTube.
Year three
Favourites
