Final Thoughts

Today is not only my last day of high school, but the last day of Globaloria and I must say that it has been an interesting time. I had no idea a class like this was out there until I heard about it last year. It's a very nice idea although slightly confusing at times. I really enjoyed getting to play with flash and making animations. It's something I've been interested in and have never had a chance to do. I never thought I could be doing anything like this, but I've made a couple of cute animations.
I feel like I've kind of failed though. I wasn't able to finish the game we spent so long planning about, or even a nice looking functional game demo. I know if I worked harder I would have been able to do it, but what I've put forth I'll have to deal with. It's not very good and I'm sorry I didn't work harder. If I had to go another year of school though I would take this class and do better I think.
I really enjoyed my teacher, my classmates, and the work. I just hope every thing will go smoothly next year. :'3

Updates

My teacher went over some things that we needed to do to bring our grades up, but I had every thing updated and what not so I'm ok for this class. I worked with the game demo a little while, but I still can't figure out how to get those stupid buttons working on 2.0. I've watched the videos a thousand times and have done every thing the person told me to do, but they just aren't working. I guess I'll leave this class being one pro button maker, but a very lousy navigator. Can't win them all I guess.

Visitors!!

On Friday some people from Globaloria came by to talk to us about our games. They taught us a little bit more about what civics are, which was really helpful, but they really didn't help with anything technical. They really should have came at the begining of the year so they could have shown us examples sooner. I don't think our game has much do with what they wanted them to do.
On Monday Ramey Barker came to talk to us. He mostly went over censorship and not getting frustrated or anything, but it was an interesting talk.

Focusing...

So after a whole eight days off from school I'm slowly picking back up on work. I'm pretty sure I didn't get any blog posts published last week which means I'm going to have to work double hard to bring every thing up.
To bring anyone up to pace with what's happening we finished our game demo in 3.0, but the back button wouldn't work. Having no where else to go we got a hold of the globaloria help desk and showed them what was going on whith it while I successfully managed to put sound on it. They got back to us and said they could fix it, but it would be a lot easier to just publish it in 2.0 and work on fixing it there, so here I am, working on recoding buttons that could have easily been done a long time ago. There's nothing I can do but keep working on it and hopefully get every thing done in time. I really hope I won't have any trouble with 2.0....

Sounds, sounds, sounds

So I decided that it's time to take a little break from tweaking our game demo before I pull out all my hair and focus on sound. Me and Jeffrey both decided on what kind of noise we're going to put on our game demo for the button clicks, but we're still pondering the fact of having music playing through the whole game. It would add a little bit of pizzaz and entertainment, but it would also be annoying after a while plus I don't know if we'd be able to pull it off in all honesty. So I think we're just going to have a little 'boinging' noise for buttons clicks. There's also going to be a buzzer sound when you get an answer wrong on the test and there's going to be a ding sound when you get an answer right on the test. It will be cute I think.

It feels like it's been a while....

I don't really know what's been up but there's been a lot of distractions and things from school this week, not to mention a couple of unexpected missed days. On Monday our team submitted our game demo to a contest and I'm not having high hopes for that. It looked sloppy, unprofesional, had no animation, and it didn't even have working back buttons. Even if they did like our game demo I'm pretty sure we'd be disqualified because of unproper blog posts, not filling out our time line, and an uneducationl game idea. Either way it would be nice to finish this game and see how it turns out. I'll keep trying on it really hard, but I really don't think it'll be done since I only have 19 days (give or take) of school. I've been trying to get working back buttons on the demo this whole week and I have buttons that go back, but they do something really weird. You'll move on from scene one to scene two and then to scene three and decide go back. Well the button will go back from scene three to scene two, but it will move onto scene four with out going back to scene three. I have no idea how to fix this problem and I haven't had any one to really help me out.
Today, however, I spent the class looking at other school's wiki pages and I found so many awesome game ideas and demos. I was so jelous, but it gave me a lot of cool ideas that hopefully I can fix our demo up and make it a little bit more interesting and functional. :D

Animation!

So after struggling for forever on button navigation our team finally managed to get every thing working. Now we're moving on to adding animation and it's not as complicated as some people may think. We managed to make a picture move around on our first day and I also created a cute flash movie with a barking dog (I posted that on my social profile on my wiki). We decided to start on animation in our game and the most simular style we found was a very famouse title; Super Mario

This is still kind of advanced compared to what we want to do with our game, but it gives you and idea on how every thing's going to work.

Trail Blazing and Trail Death...

The begining of this week turned out awesome. I figured out how to add navigations to buttons and started work on our key frames. I managed to get the all to move and I thought it was fine, but it's stalls at each one of the buttons and with further tinckering to try to fix it the frames do something really weird. Looks like there's even more work to be done on it....I just can't seem to get this stuff. Our class decided to move onto animation too and I thought it was pretty easy all though I didn't really do anything to difficult. I made a flash video of a dog and put it on my social profile. I was happy how it turned out. I tried to make the introduction scene for our game today, but I couldn't get the little arrow to pan up and down or anything. The more I think of it the more factors that go into and the harder it seems....I have no idea how we're going to manage this, but I guess just one step at a time or what ever. We'll get this...eventually.

Navigation at last!!!!

After missing this class Monday and coming back to some new information I finally managed to get the buttons on our keyframes to move onto the next frame and stop! I'm so happy that it finally worked. It turns out that the action codes that were given to us on the wiki were for a different version of flas, 2.0. We're using 3.0, which gives us code snippets to use. I guess they're not all the same, but I'm happy everything finally got fixed. The work in here has been pretty hard recently, but when you get it you feel like you can take on a freight train or something. We started doddling around with animation today and I made a caterpiller move around the screen, which was pretty easy. Hopefully we can get started on this game and finish it if we work hard enough. I'm happy I also downloaded a free trial of flash so I can work on some of this stuff at home.

I really need to start doing these...

Recently I've been barely getting my learning log filled out, if I finished all of the ones required last week.
We've started making buttons for our frames, which I've mastered...kind of. I can easily make an interactive one, but to make them be abel to switch to the nextt frame is another story. I tried a bit, but I kept getting an error. I think I understand what I've done wrong, and I'll try to get every thing working. Hopefully just this one time I can finally have something I understand right away instead of having to go over and over things...just this once....

Friday.....

I'm not sure if I've gotten all the blog posts I needed for this week, but there's been a lot of things happening.
First we finally fixed our team wiki page. It turns out that the vidler code was what was messing up the time line. I guess it was the spacing or something, but we finally got every thing up and going.
I've also been told that my wiki page needed some type of decoration or something to make it more interesting, so I've uploaded a couple of pictures.
I also managed to put all the keyframes on the team wiki and made sure that it showed up and was sized correctly. Now all I have to do is get al these frames moving in a slide and read a tutorial about button creation.

I didn't get a blog post in Friday.

So, I guess I was to engrossed in trying to get all the keyframes onto the page wiki that I didn't keep track of time and I was only able to update my learning log. I finally got all 12 keyframes onto the team wiki page. The size problem I was talking about earlier was really easy to fix. All I had to do was change the width from 400 to 1000. That was the size we needed to fit the whole picture. I had trouble with the last three though. Even though I had both the fla. version and swf. version of each file uploaded and showing and I looked over the code I used about four or five times, finding no errors, it only shows a link to the flash version, but it doesn't show a picture. I also need to anwer the questions from "Adding a scene" into my blog. I also need to update my own wiki page with more information, pictures, videos, or what ever to give it more pizzaz! I have plenty of things to do today and probably the rest of the week. Hopefully there will be no problems.
Also, we have a half a day coming up this Wendsday so we will not be in this class. I think I need to stop being lazy and do some of this stuff from home or at least research it or something.

AH!! :D

So, we had to upload all the keyframes and thing to our team wiki page to show what we've been working on and I finally got it! It took forever, but there's finally picture up there. Sadly, however, we have a size problem. I'm going to have to try to fix that some how, but for now I'm living in the moment.

ARGH!!!

Yesterday I tried, and failed, at trying to get the keyframes into a controlable slideshow. I don't understad what I'm doing wrong, but I'll get this eventually. I think I'm going to go through the adobe video tutorials step by step again to try and make them. I have no idea what I'm doing....

Complications...

All the work that I've done so far may be considered worthless. What we're doing now is easy to get a hang of if I made all my keyframes in flash, but I have no idea how to work with them since they're in paint.....I think I'm going to have to redo every thing. Man....

Finally!!

My computer finally has flash installed on it so I can get to work putting all these keyframes together. I'm having some confusion on how to do it though. I've made all my keyframes in paint since we didn't have flash to draw on, but all the tutorials and things show us how to fix everything into a movie clip done in flash. It goes into all this stuff about backgrounds and what not, but one of my fellow students, Daniel, ran into the same problem as me and found a way to do it. I might have confused what he told me, but as far as I understand I have to do this:
Make each one of my twelve keyframes into it's own flash file and then put each one into the time line where it's meant to go.
I'm still a little confused, but class is called class for a reason and everything has been a learning expierance in this one the whole year. Luckily I have my classmates and teacher to help me out.


On a side note, our team entered our game into the competition since we found out the dead line had been expanded for every one. Hopefully we can get every thing up and running and have chance to win a free laptop perhaps......? :'3

Man....

So...the keyframes and stuff I've put down on paper were actually meant to be on the computer, so that means that I'm going to have to redue everything I wrote in Microsoft word and paint an all that jazz. It's really annoying, but it has to be done...

Updates

I've missed quite a bit of class this week due to holidays, dentist appointments, and assemblies. We finally finished moving all the new-ish computers into the room and getting every thing situated, but none of them have flash so we're falling far behind schedual and came to terms with the fact that we probably won't finish our games this year.
While waiting for flash to be installed on all of the computers we've been filling out information about our games such as team intros, what's meant to be learned from it, and what kind of qualities make our game unique.
Jeffery's also been fooling around with the music that's going into the game and helping me get some of the information down. Hopefully we can go back to flash soon and it'll be faster and better than what we were dealing with on our old computers.

"Drawing a Scene" activity

We were told in our drawing a scene course to list a new idea or concept I've learned about my game topic since I started this course and in all honesty I really haven't learned anything new about the B.P. oil spill. Ever since we started the "Drawing a Scene" course I've just been focused on learning everything I can about flash like what tool does what, how to draw on it, how to add animation, and a bunch of other stuff. I've learned a lot from the tutorials on the wiki and the video tutorials on Adobe tv though. They're very reliable because they're made to help us understand how to work flash. Why would any one want to mislead us with wrong information especially since they were made by the Globaloria team and the company that make the flash player.

It's been a while...

It's been a while since I've actually posted anything on my  blog. We didn't have any school on Monday and Tuesday due to a busted water pipe, I was sick Wendesday, and on Thursday blogger was down.
Recently there's been some new computers being moved into our class and it's cause a bit of chaos. We probably won't be able to continue on in flash for a while, but it gives us time to read up on things such as flash timelines and key frams and aslo working on improving our learning logs and blogs.
Yesterday I spent the day with my team mate, Jeffery, reading about key frames and the timeline on a tutorial. I thought it was really helpful although with out getting to try it out I don't know if I've fully grasped what it was trying to teach me.
Today we were told to check out Ally's learning log to compare it to ours. Her's is more straight to the point than mine. It shows every thing she's done when she's done it, while mine tends to ramble off about things I think. In the future I'll be sure to cut it down and stick to telling what I've been doing.

Flash, flash, flash....

Yesterday was a snow day so we didn't do anything obviously. The other day we learned how to use the pen tool to copy pictures of cartoon characters into our game. If I did everything right it was pretty easy.

So...

We've been watching flash tutorials on Adobe T.V. the past week, and it's been pretty helpful. I've played with things in flash that I've never got the chance to look into. It's still a little confusing, but I'm sure I'll have enough time to play around to understand.

Chugging along...

So yesterday was a half a day so obviously no work was finished in this class. Even though we started practicing with flash and every thing this class seems to just slowly move along. Not because our teacher isn't teaching or anything. She's very good at trying to explain every thing and what not, but we've had so many interuptions....I hope I can get every thing finished before graduation.

Oh man

Blogger's working for once....it's been a while since my last post and we haven't been doing much thanks to snow days and what not. We started playing around in flash and it's really easy to draw in. We're watching video tutorials to help us understand some more of the things we can do.

It's been a while...

It seems blogger is finally coming up on the computers at school today HUZZAH! Nothing much has happened since the last time I blogged I do believe. We've tried uploading our paper prototype to viddler, but are having difficulties in doing so. There's also been a pretty good bit of snow days as well, which has thrown off our work. Today we're going to fool around with flash today. I'm excited about it.

What a chaotic week....

Last week our teacher was sick and absent for a while, but we still managed to get our paper protoyped filmed despite all the technical difficulties and what not. This week we haven't been to shool since Tuesday and we haven't gotten much done. We still need to upload it to our viddler and putting it up on our team wiki.

A long break, but we're back!

We've been off for a long time due to Holidays and bad weather, but now things are going back to normal and people are starting to get back on track. Today we've been told to start a practice run on recording our paper prototypes. It should be easy since all we have to do is cut out our pieces and start working.