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.

Cold Creature

Here is the cold creature so far.  I plan to make it look more like its cold by editing its body position but this one was just to try and get the colours right.

Finished creature

This is the creature in what probably is its final stage.  I may tweak bit and pieces but for now this is it.  Next I have to make the creature in its various states.  First up is when it is cold.

Here are the icons I made in studio today.  There is one button that I still have not made for cleaning as I have not come up with a good icon that represents it clearly.

Creature head V1

Here is the head of the creature I am planing to use (and yes I know it looks like a yellow cow).   This is just a simple render with only shadows added, I plan to try and add some shading later on today, but now it is time for a break.

Pixel art

I figured out how to re-size the pictures with out losing quality.  I had to save them as a .png instead of JPEG, as JPEG causes blending of near by colours.  Also I had to re-size the images in paint as Photoshop tends to blur colours when increasing size.

This is one of the first images I did as a practice.  It is a dog.

Friday and Weekend work

In Fridays studio was the first time I had a proper go at trying to use adobe flash.  It would have been earlier but I slept in on Tuesday and missed the studio :P. I learnt how to make basic animations and buttons which should be all that I need to make the interface in flash.

Also on Friday I decided that the style of the interface will be like the video games of the 90's such as pokemon and Final Fantasy before number 7.  I thought the pixel art style would suit the way the interface is being presented on a hand held console.  So this weekend I have been trying to learn how to make graphics in this style, with various degrees of success.  Unfortunately I can not show any of it as it quite small and I haven't figured out a way to blow it up and save it while keeping the quality yet.

Also this weekend I have been trying to come up with the look of the creature.  Still have not come up with a final idea, but I know the creature will have four limbs and a tail to show the well known emotions seen in animals that children should recognize.

For Tuesdays studio I hope to have posted up some of my work on the pixel art and have the creature in pretty much it's final design, so that the flash interface can be almost finished by next Sunday.

Assignment 2 hand-in A: Write-up

For this project I plan to design a interface for children that brings awareness of how much power their house hold is using and how to save power.  To do this I plan to design a creature which “lives” off the power that the house hold saves over a period of time.  This creature is will be contained on a portable device such as an ipod or handheld game console.  The interface will have to be simple to understand but be able to show multiple things at once, such as how much power you are saving and way to save more power.

Through the children using the interface I hope to also change the way that the people around them see energy.  As children can be very annoying and so by giving them a goal, like looking after a creature, they will strive to achieve this and will tell their families to save energy just to keep the creature happy.

For this to work there must be a way for the device to check the power usage at least daily.  The technology needed for this may come from digital power meters but I want to be more specific than that and measure individual applications of energy and how saving on say heating will keep the creature from freezing etc.

Assignment 2 hand-in A: Pictures

This is the prototype for my idea.  The first is just the creature with out the menu open and the rest show the menu and how different types of energy affect the creature differently.

The Big Idea

In Fridays studio we presented the two best ideas we had to the tutor to talk over.  The ideas I presented were the monster idea and a bunch of calculations trying to figure out a way to put power in a way that everyone can understand.

My tutor liked my work on both ideas but said I needed to figure out which one I was doing and to what audience and how I was going to present the interface to the user(portable device, PC etc.) After talking it over I decided that the monster idea probably lent it self to children more than any other audience so focusing on that the tutor suggested I call it a creature instead of a monster as monsters are seen as scary.

Another reason for changing the name was because I had an idea to change the creature so that instead of feed off the excess energy you use it would require you to use certain amount of power every day, calculated by filling out a quick form, and if you went over this amount it would start starving the creature and making it sad and weak.  The reason for this is that I thought if the creature got bigger by the more energy you used, people would purposely use more energy to make the creature bigger.

For where the creature will be placed, at first I thought it could be on a computer, but then I realized children lie to move around a lot.  So to make sure that the children are constantly checking their energy usage and consciously making sure to save energy, the interface would have to be on a portable device.  I still haven't decided to make it on a stand alone device or allow it to work on existing portable devices such as gaming consoles and ipods, but more research should help me with this decision.

The break and Ideas

First off, over the holiday we were required to make a dairy of how much power we used each day.  During this I discovered many thing about the device I used to record the energy that were really bad design flaws.

Firstly was the size of the device.  Because it was so large, it made it difficult to plug it into some power points that are behind desks and then also plug the devices being recorded.  This also made it hard to read as it was behind something and in the dark, which brings me on to my second point that the screen did not light up.  This made it very difficult to read in the places that a lot of power points are positioned.  My final annoyance at the device was the readings on the device did not seem like they would make much sense to somebody with no understanding of power to begin with.  Also the manual and the device did little to explain the meaning of the numbers on the screen.

Using this device helped a lot in deciding what not to do and over the break I tried to think of ideas for this project, but it wasn't until today that I started to come up with ideas that could actually be a project.  As you can see above in the photo most of the ideas are for how the interface could work but not actually what it should be.  The idea I liked the best was a monster that consumes the energy that you waste and becomes larger and starts running around the interface being generally terrifying.  For Friday I hope to expand this idea and also try and come up with another idea as this is the only idea I like so far, which does not help me if this idea can not be achieved for a reason.