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.