Task 6 Evaluation

Ultimately upon the completion of my project and the work it consisted of I was rather pleased I managed to reconstruct most of if not all of my FMP in such a short scale of time so close to the unit deadline, I was able to show myself that I was able to work under preassure and under short timescales. it also taught me that when I work on big projects that I need to make back up copies of files so that if large files go corrupt I have a backup ready to go instead of having to redo hours upon hours of work all over again.

in the short space of time that we had I also helped my fellow students and tutors in constructing the theme for our class, the theme for our class consisted of a zombie theme where we had models and lighting put up with art and design spread around the classroom.

the art styles of the class consisted of similar design to this image below.

it was aimed at students and designed in such a way to be a general theme so it was more of a classic zombies theme. I helped put some of the boarding and silk throughout the classroom and designed my desk which consisted of maps with graffiti on them to help match the zombie theme, the maps I wanted to help my application stand out for a theme which I worked hard on to put together and spent 20 Pounds on mapping and essentials to hold it together. My area also consisted of some of the previous work I had done in the 2nd and 1st years of college. 

Feedback

I had beta tested and asked for feedback on my app from 2 students in my class, Lewis Wain and Jack Challoner both which helped me beta test for any bugs or missing code which helped push it into the final version and finalize it in tablet form and also helped with some feedback including issues surrounding user friendlyness and questions about how students may react to or behave while out on these journeys. I replied and responded with adding more information to the journeys as Jack said there was not enough information on some of the pages which I agreed with, I then before release upgraded the app to contain more information about the journeys. 

Specialist Factors.

My influence for this project was purely down to culture and marketing, I wanted to know what we had and what we didn't have and how my project could stand out among a crowd, I had analysed what we didn't have and came to the conclusion that students and travellers do not have a mapping system capable of guiding them in first person. Originally I did want to take the application further, and so I did do a little market research in the development process, this consisted of legal issues, data protection, how much money I could potentially make and extras for the application. I discovered that I would have to go through all my photos and cover each license plate and face down to laws on data protection, this knocked me back a little and I decided not to pursue it further, however I still did market research to find out if pedestrians would be willing to pay for such an application if it came into existence.

The answer in turn was yes, and they'd be willing to pay 1 pound a download for something to help them feel more aqauinted to the city this was good news as it showed that I have the potential to create something that could possibly market well and rival other applications. after my research my scale of production had significantly reduced as I did not plan on taking it any further than my final major project for private use, thus its function and form are purely educational based and private to help me achieve the grades and knowledge required to further develop my abilities as a games developer. 

all of this research and knowledge influenced the development of my idea and helped construct its current appearance today, I feel happy I am capable of developing something that could have potential to stand with other apps on a market. 

Task 5 Production

All the Images seen below are most of the images I designed myself for the production of the app. Once I had the idea of what I wanted to do it was fairly easy putting it all together. I had placed all of the images into a image processor and shrunk them down to size, this effectively allowed me to have the application run a bit more conveniently compared to running at a slower speed with larger files. 

within my timeplan I had everything more or less developed, and was more or less on schedule for the summer show and the development of the application I had named " the students guide to plymouth ". I then continued to spend the weeks placing my application together until I ran into several complications on the 30th of may which involved flash proffessional locking up and removing all my work. this set me back significantly and under alot of preassure I decided I had to try and do it again.

 this became rather unfortunate as I had to replace some of the code and every single frame and mechanic all over again. this in turn lead to several drawbacks including a lack of some journeys, some sounds and finishing touches i'd of liked to of added to my FMP. during this time of development I had ended up spending long hours in college to catch up to my original point and finish the project, one day leading an 11 hr session of working in flash and fixing many many errors but eventually with sheer determination I did manage to complete it to a presentable state for the summer show and transfer it onto a Nexus tablet in working order. 

Task 4 Detailing Designs and Production Timeline

After my presentations and design ideas I started production on the general outlines of how I was going to design my application. I started to develop flash proffessional in a manner where each journey had a seperate area of the timeline.

this stock photo shows examples of timeline where certain parts have seperate areas, this is essentially how I had to design my application, although I had to do it frame by frame which consisted of about 300+ frames altogether. 

I had also had to go out and take 300 odd images also including journeys from town to plymbridge as seen below, journeys to saltram and the barbican among some of the popular places people enjoy during the summer, these developments were very time consuming as during the time the weather was not up to standard and taking electrical equipment out in the rain was not very convenient. 

The Journeys took several hours each to capture, and I had to ensure the images were captured and saved before returning the equipment to the ERC suite in PCA.

During these developments it became rather evident that I had to develop a time plan that would aid me safely into the summer show and deadline periods. this time plan consisted of taking the images and if possible videos, editing them down to the correct size and placing them with code into the application.