done at last

The interface is done.  It has a much more realistic look to the buttons and I have implemented the thought bubbles of what needs to be turned off when the user highlights the associated bar.  I gave up on the game due to the complexity it would give to the interface and lack of time due to working on the video presentation of the interface.  Maybe with a complete redesign of the interface it could work, but with its current aesthetic it does not work, and a complete redesign would take much too long.  Now it is done and here is the final screen shot.

Flash Improvement

On Friday when I went to my tutorial I was informed that we have an extra two weeks to polish up our flash interfaces.  We presented what we had to the tutors and got feed back on what we should improve.  They said that I should change my target audience to people who grew up with video games that had the pixel art look as one of the tutors believed that the children would not understand the look and think that the game was broken or old.  Also they said that the interface should be available on touch pad devices such as touch screen phones as it would be easier for the new target audience to have around as they generally always have their phones on them.  This is really just changes to the idea behind the interface rather than the interface itself and were really meant for when I make the video about the interface.

Changes that they said I should make to the interface were to make the buttons more photorealistic which gives it a nice aesthetic for an interface on mobile devices.  Also I hope to be implementing some form of game function to finish off my ideas.

Here is an image of the interface as I was not able to put the swf file on blogger.

Late Night

While relaxing trying to fall asleep it is amazing what your think of.  I just made a few changes to the interface to make it make sense.  The main change was the home bar did not increase when one of the other bars increased.  This has been fixed now.

Also I said earlier on that I was going to add thought bubbles to show what appliances could be turned off to reduce the power usage for a specific category.  I have tried multiple times to implement this but for some reason it keeps breaking the interface.  This has therefore not been implemented.

User Testing

After testing out the interface on some people at the hall and implementing their ideas I have slowed down the breathing animation on the creature to make it look more realistic.  People felt that the creature was worried or stressed and when I had it breathing fast.

While most people did not understand just from using the interface that it was a way of interpreting power usage in a house, after a quick explanation about it they got the idea.  From the feed back that I received I believe that the interface would be successful at showing children how to save energy in their household in a way that they can interpret it.

DONE!!!

The flash animation is done.  I have animated the creature now and have added a hungry creature and implemented most of the buttons.  I have not add anything to do with the games I was planing to add.  I may add it in after some testing with users which hopefully show some constructive feed back and help me improve the interface slightly before hand in.

What I have learned from this project is that when you start to use a new program, you have got to start early as possible so that you can get the most time possible to figure out the things that you want to do.  With this project I was unable to do as much user testing as I wanted to as I was unable to produce a complete enough version of the interface until the last three days.

Anyway here is the hungry version of the creature.  I made the creature look grumpy so that the reason for it not being able to play the games is that it is grumpy at the user for "stealing" its food.  Just looking at it now I have decided to move the feet in front of the hands in the final as I think this will make it look better proportioned.

Stuff I Did Today

Today I completed a lot of work that had to be done.  All of the creature images but the hungry on are now fully rendered.  Speaking of which here is the cold creature that I didn't post yesterday and the render of the others that I posted yesterday.

Also I have got the interface working completely.  All that is left to do is to fix the animations on so of the menu stuff and animate the creature for Friday!!!  I would post another image of the device but  it looks the same but now it works properly.  

I have also decided that while the games that you can play with the creature are a good idea the time taken to implement this would be too long.  I may just add another menu with a list of games that can be played with the creature to show this.  Otherwise I am pretty much done :)

The Weekend

Well this weekend I ran out of internet so I could not post anything I did during that time so here it all is.

These are two images I did during the weekend for the interface.  The one on the left is the bored creature, which happens when the house hold uses too much energy on entertainment, and the one on the right is the dirty creature, which happens when the too much energy goes into cleaning and water.  I decided to combine the cleaning and water together as water is usually seen as being clean and that I could not come up with a good way to make the creature look really thirsty without making it look too strange(such as one sketch where I had the creature looking like dry earth).  These images are still not quite finished as I still have to add shading to some parts and more dirt to the dirty creature.


I also did the creature when it is sold in a different pose to make it look like it felt the cold.  Unfortunately I saved it in the wrong format so I can't upload it at this time as photoshop is on my other OS.


The only one left to make is the hungry creature which I am looking for inspiration currently to make an obviously hungry creature.

Also this weekend I managed to get a good portion of the interface working.  The current colour is not final and is just a place holder until I decide.  It is currently possible to scroll through the menu using the blue buttons on the 'device'.  The menu animates when moving to the right correctly but when going left through the menu the menu animates in the wrong direction which I still have to fix.  Also I am currently trying to implement that when you click on the energy bars they toggle between a below the over use of energy line, and above the line, which changes the appearance of the creature.  I don't think I will do this for the home bar as this shows the energy use for the entire house so if anything is wrong it is probably going to be also in the other categories, which will make it change into one of the other states anyway.


Also I was going to have the creature in multiple states such as bored and cold, hungry and dirty etc. but I may have to cut this due to time constraints and the time it takes to make an image.


I will probably add animated creature for the images I have and will do, but nothing to complicated, probably only two or three frame animations.


I have also been thinking of trying to give the children a reason to keep the creature 'healthy'.  I thought about adding a game element which the child could play alone or against friends and their creatures.  If the creature is not happy it would not be able to play the games, for instance when it is bored it would just sleep and not wake up until the problem is fixed.


This also lead me to think how long the measurements should be taken for.  For instance if the power was monitored over the whole month the child may have to wait along time for the energy to reset the creature to be able to be playable again, at which point the child may have forgotten about the creature and monitoring power.  I think right now that it should record for the last week of time but be updated every hour so that the child is able to do something about the energy usage in the house quite quickly.

Finally the creature will have thought bubbles on what needs to be turned off or have its energy reduced when it gets over the limits.  This is assuming that the houses in the not to distance future will all have a power measurement system which can measure the power usage of appliances individually.   The alternative is to have the system measure the circuits in individual rooms and base on what the room is it would update certain categories depending on this, i.e.. the kitchen would do cooking the bathroom cleaning and water the lounge entertainment.

Tomorrow I hope to have the static interface (without animated creature) finished and then the rest of the week can be used to polish it up.