Hectic Week

Well I’ve been swamped with work and piled with deadlines upon deadlines. I’ve managed to meet some of these deadlines and finish the project briefs for both placements which I am pleased with because they were hard in some way and took me forever to complete.

The Disney brief was to focus on one aspect of game design and produce it in the medium of my choice. I chose to focus on the menu screen (I haven’t a clue why… it seemed simple at first glance!) and created it in Flash. I researched many different computer games in the collection at home, to online and YouTube. the section of the menu screen I looked at included the start up menu where the player would choose a new or existing file to play and also the menu which loads up during the game when the player presses the start button. I found the start up menu to be most fun and interesting to make because I noticed many games would have a start up screen related to a feature within the game to entice the player. Here I opted to use a domestic design and used a washing machine screen as the menu. When the user scrolls through the options the knob on the machine will click along with them to engage interaction. Once the option has been selected, the camera would pan out to enlarge the image on the domestic appliance and show a Guinea Pig being spun around in the woking washing machine. (This was supposedly for fun and no Guinea Pigs were harmed during the making of this application.) When I have time I shall load the swf file to the server and link it here.

Click to view the swf file!  (You would need to refresh the page a few times if you want to return to the main screen ^^;;)

As for the other placement brief, I had to create a skeleton website from php for ‘www.drinksforbusiness.com’, an e-commerce website which focuses on personalised drinks to be used as corporate gifts. The only problem with this was… I only just started learning php not long ago… (uh-oh) So I had to browse the internet and ask for help. Luckily I managed to get the site done to a reasonable standard and get the php scripts reading the database I made. There were many problems with the CSS, including syntax and jumbled up attributes which needed a day of cleaning up and getting the pages to look correct (plus the same!). The hardest part was trying to make the site FireFox and I.E compatible. It looked alright in Firefox but not in I.E and I almost had to pull my hairs out trying to find the answer. Luckily people were out there to help and the site looks good. (Except for the few broken links, but it’s a skeleton site eh?)

View the skeleton site here

What I’m focusing now is on my university assignments and also them graphic images I need to give to Tristan… I’ve been postponing them for so long, it’s not good. I’ve managed to get my Time-Based Media assignment filmed and ready to be edited. Was so happy since my initial idea fell through the roof and I ended up having to scrap it and rewrite a new script. Was annoying but I think it’ll be a half decent opening trailer.
So yeah the synopsis has changed and you may read it here.

I’ve started working on my AJAX assignment where we are to create a shopping cart page that allows users to drag and drop items into the shopping cart. Really interesting assignment but I’m sure it’ll be hard, seeing what Big Dave has done so far and had trouble with it all… Dreading it already! So far I’m selling a Barbie toy doll and a Hello Kitty plush. Now I need toys for the boys…