The Idea

 

The Idea of my project was inspired by virtual reality gaming. My goal was to convey the beginnings of a life simulation game designed to attract a young audience; especially those interesting in RPG games and life stimulation games such as ‘The Sims.’

 

The location

 

I designed a park allowing for easy movement of the Sprite. It is also a neutral, easily recognisable location attracting both boy and girl audiences. Using Photoshop I created the blue sky and grass. I animated the grass by creating three frames on Photoshop, each frame with the grass a darker shade and place in different positions on the image. The clouds were another layer, to make them move across the screen I made the ‘x’ variable of each cloud increase ‘++’ or decrease ‘ – -’ every time the ‘draw function’ was called until it reached the end of the screen and was reset to the first position.

 

The Sprite

 

For the Sprite character I created a male teenager. His look and style were inspired by Japanese animation as the Japanese Game Industry is very famous and popular due to their Role playing games and animation design. As I intended for this to be a part of a game, I also added user interface properties, allowing the player to control the Sprite such as changing the colour of the Sprite’s clothes and, more importantly, the control over his movement on screen. To make the Sprite move, I created frames for each step in Photoshop before coding the image into an animation function. I also assigned buttons on the keyboard through ‘input.keyCode’ to make it move up, down, left and right as long as it stays on the screen , and similarly to change the shirt colour.
To change the colour of the Sprite’s shirt, I created four different versions of the Sprite. I made ‘If’ statements which controlled which file of the Sprite was inputted into the Code depending on what button is held down. The difficulty I had was that I could not get the shirt to change colours as a ‘switch’ function. I attempted to use a ‘Boolean,’ but it only ran once as the code which made ‘button = !button’ did not work. Instead I used the ‘keyPressed’ and ‘keyReleased’ to make temporary changes.

 

Music

 

I added music that runs continuously through the animation to create a peaceful atmosphere. To create the music I edited a WAV file of sounds of flutes( www.freesound.org) with a WAV file of sounds of nature(www.freesound.org) on Audacity then changed the format to M4A. I inputted the sound into the code, making it play by creating a counter and having ‘audio.play’ run as soon as the counter was ‘counter>0.’ I also added sounds of footsteps (www.freesound.org) when the Sprite is moved using the same process to add realism. To keep the sprite on screen I added a warning sound; when the right end of the screen is reached the Sprite would say ‘Maybe I should turn back’ until it is moved away from the edge. The voice was recorded then edited on Audacity. The problem I had with this was the sound quality of the recording. To improve I would use a better recording device. This was added to the code by the use of ‘If’ statements.

 

Additions

 

Additionally, there is more interaction as it is also possible to have the person release the balloon and have it float away off screen or, if it is preferred, the balloon can be forced to stay on screen by moving it away from the edge using buttons on the keyboard. This was achieved with the use of ‘KeyPressed’ and ‘keyReleased.’

 

Comments

 

Overall the movement and music were a success. There was a problem that some functions became faulty on some web browsers(I used Chrome). To improve I would add more interaction with the Sprite, for example, a change of character or a jumping function. I would also make the location more visually interesting.