So after the critiques and my many failed attempts at getting a basic functioning Concept 7, I ended up settling for Concept 3 as it seemed the most feasible.
I began the development of Concept 3 by giving it a new background. Since it was a game involving hens and eggs, I decided to make the background resemble a hen house.
A semi lo-fi sketch of a new background
By using this instead of the gradient I had, it makes the background much more relative to the game as well as set the atmosphere. I then experimented with various colour palettes on the background to see which worked best. While doing this, I also worked on the chicken a little bit more so that it looks more integrated in to the scene. Below you can see these experiments:
Replaced the hen with one a bit more clip art toon influence.
The new background has also had a RYGB influenced make over.
By using natural colours, I tried to make all the elements on screen look like they belong. But I still encountered problems though, for example:
Blue / Turquoise: looked like it was set in the night time, I doubt this is the time eggs are laid.
Green: gives me the sense that the hen house is located in the forest and surrounded by bamboo. I also doubt this colour is common around the farm environment.
Sepia: this is the colour that looked most appealing to, regardless of it being quite desaturated. I can see this colour being used in a farming environment as it is a more earth / sunny colour.
Red: it looks like there is a very angry sunset taking place in this scene. The look I was aiming for is slightly less dramatic and a bit more relaxed. It also seems a bit too saturated near the top.
After settling on the colour, I decided that since there will be three eggs dropping at the same time, it only makes sense to include 3 hens sitting at the top. This would not only make sense, but also give the whole scene an overall sense of balance when the eggs begin to drop.
I didn’t like the eggs sitting beneath the hens, most likely will take them
out at a later stage
I think by tweaking the sepia towards a warmer orange, the scene overall seems like its basking in sunlight, it’s also closer to the natural colour of wood and is therefore more acceptable. I’m still not happy with the look of the hens as they now seem too uniform, I also think the background looks a little too flat and may require more saturation. I’m going to have to slow down a little on the gui and focus a bit more on the coding language.
I have been receiving some help online as well as following a lot of tutorials online to understand how to write conditional successfully. One of the ways I practiced this was to download pieces of code with their visual counterparts and then decipher the language line by line. When I thought I understood a section I would apply my own conditions to it and execute it again to see if they applied the way I expected them to.
After much trial and error of this I came to the following conclusion; if I include a basket / nest at the bottom to catch the eggs then the condition could be set in the following manner:
If the egg is at x-pixel (bottom of screen) then -1 point from life.
If the egg is at y-pixel (just above basket) and the basket is in the same field then +1 to point.
Egg re-appears on the top with a random speed.
(Well something along that line anyway)
Rather than having three separate eggs falling down and then three separate pieces of codes to control them, I was advised by a user on the Nokia Forums to just create three separate instances of the egg with a single piece of code, and then a separate piece of code to drop them at random speeds. The duplicating would simply be executed by using the following piece of code “duplicateMovieClip(“eggsample_mc”, “eggsample1_mc”,1); etc… for the next two.
Then following that I would need to declare each of the eggs positions on screen (by pixels) and tell it to descend at a random speed.
I had this piece of code working semi-successfully after tedious editing and researching. The problem I encountered now was, if my basket was already on the left and I pressed left again, it would disappear off screen – and the same goes for the right side. Then after much lurking on the forums (stated previously) I figured out what the problem was, I had forgotten to state x and y dimensions / properties of the basket, hence why it kept moving off screen. So by setting this, I countered that problem.
The rest after this point was somewhat easier since the same principles applied to the normal Flash lingo. I just had to include two dynamic text boxes on screen to collect the life and score points, and then one for the end when the final score would be shown.
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