evaluation thing yup

To be honest I found this project a little overwhelming, and I always tend to make too much work for myself anyway. I knew from the start that I didn’t want to do anything too “gamey” or obvious. I think the main reason I’m not much of a gamer (apart from being poor and a short attention span) is because the main games market seems to follow the same formula over and over again (lets kill things!!). I find virtually killing things as amusing as the next person but I really wanted to try to stretch the brief, and see what else is possible. So I created a little world to explore, with no real story or character to identify with.

It shows in my feed back from my crit / exhibition. It’s positive but a bit confused. I think some people didn’t really know what to do, which was just wander around and click things and see what happens. One person commented they couldn’t see how my branch / tree was an island, which is fair enough as I really tried to push what the idea of an island was. I think a simple help page or a quick intro at the start might have cleared up the confusion.

I think the sound design and animation have worked well, even though I would have liked to have experimented more with both. The idea for the tibetan singing bowls came from a discussion during one of the tutorials where people suggested that I use koto or other kinds of eastern sounds, unfortunately all I could find that really suited my game were the singing bowls, and a couple of tingshaw mp3s. Which I think work really well, I love how the sounds build up as you move along the branch and reverberate.

My original idea for the visuals was to have three or four different modes for viewing the world, starting from a barren branch where you could make the flowers bloom in either 3d, vector or wireframe modes. I decided to abandon this though and just do the 3d version as I was already getting sick of using flash at this point, I’m using the excuse that this is a demo version! Another thing I’ve let myself get out of doing because this is a demo are the animations for the flowers on the other half of the tree, once again I was getting sick of flash.

But I did make myself (kinda) work out how to use context free, which is a little program that makes images from maths. One of the flowers spurts out a branch / growth / pretty thing when you click it, which was an animation I made in context free. I still don’t really understand how to use it, my maths skills are appalling, and I was already learning action script at the time, so I was a bit overwhelmed on the scripting side of things.

Overall I’m really happy with how this has turned out, I’m just going to stay away from Maya and Flash for a while. Well, maybe not Maya.