Back | Final work | Evaluation | Blog
The Brief
To create an interactive installation using the BBC Big Screen as a display platform. The theme for the content of the installation fits in with the BBC’s ongoing campaign of ‘Breathing Places’ and in particular focuses on ‘growing things’
The Final Project
View the website and online game here.
The Blog
As part of the project we were asked to complete a blog to record our progress.
View the blog here.
I joined my group for the interactive environments project late due to being on holiday. My group members Claire Anthony, Liam Smith and Michael Wilkinson started by sharing ideas and brainstorming. I gave them my feedback on their ideas and added my own ideas on the blog whilst I was away.
We decided that the game would be kept simple and consist of a small patch of crops in a garden that a user had to grow by making activity. Once we all agreed on the idea for the game we did research into what we wanted the game to look like. I produced a mood board of colours, drawings and photos to explore a style of game we could produce. The feel of the mood board was a scrapbook style using photo-realism images. As a group we all agreed this style might be too complicated so for our simple game. I carried on doing more research into games such as sues garden and happy farm which use cute vector images in soft earthy colours and kawaii style vegetable drawings.
We had originally decided we would have a narrator character for the game so I did some research into images of gnomes and a little bluebird. Using illustrator I drew a bluebird character to be our narrator, which we later decided not to use.
We finally decided on using vector style images for our game, once this was decided we delegated jobs to each other. My job was to design the layout for both a summer and winter garden. I researched photos on the web, looking at colours and features of a winter and summer garden. I drew both layouts in illustrator using the pen tool. I received good feedback from the group but my design was later to be changed to Liams design as it had more depth in the image and room for other elements in the game.
After meeting with Jeremy from the BBC, Claire and myself produced a flowchart of how the game would play so we could get a clearer idea of what we needed to achieve. I started work on researching different vegetables, as a group we decided on 3 vegetables for summer including lettuce, tomato and carrots and 3 vegetables for winter including squash, potatoes and beetroot. I sketched ideas of how the vegetables would look as simple vector drawings using photos of the actual vegetable. As a group we delegated myself to draw the summer vegetables and Claire to draw the winter vegetables. I drew mine using the pen tool in illustrator using simple shapes and lines. Colours chosen were complimentary shades.
Project Review
Did our project work out as planned?
Overall I am pleased with the outcome of our project. We had originally planned to do more but time constraints and other conflicting workloads meant we had to leave some of those ideas behind. I believe myself Claire and Liam worked well as a team and we all work on areas were our strengths are.
Sarah Aylward | Copyright ©