Design and Development

Below you'll find some annotated screenshots of my flash project file. I'm doing initial designs on Flash with a graphics tablet rather than on paper as I find it easier to get my ideas down digitally and this way I can roughly animate and add in frames when I feel a section is too short and just generally build the layout for my animation with real ease.

My plan is to first draw out each scene then record myself using a screen cap software flying my ship designs made on Kerbal Space Program, mimicking each required shot. I'll then take screenshots of the video at appropriate times and fade them in Flash to create more detailed drawings than I would otherwise be able to do.

As you can see above this is just a basic flash animation outlining to help me map out which angles camera angles I should use when recording Kerbal Space Program. I've mapped out the entire animation this way but I'll keep screenshots minimal as to not spam pictures all over the blog.

I've put notes under my background to dictate when I want certain noises or music etc. I find it helpful to do this as it helps me visualise what the final product will come out as so I can mildly critique and subsequently alter my plans as I go along.

As you can see I can easily add dictations on the side to show which camera shots I plan on using to progress from one scene to the next.

For this particular shot, which shows a screen flashing up with a warning, I've added both a sound effect as well as some dialogue in speech marks before. This particular shot I had to lengthen substantially to make it feel like it had enough length to get the dialogue out and be on the screen for long enough to make an impact.

This screen shows an interactive segment for my animation wherein you choose what weapon you want to use. 3 of which are real and the final is a troll weapon that doesn't really do much. Depending on which weapon you choose you'll be allocated a certain number of points towards your overall score.

Here's the final score screen, ultimately the score is pointless but it could act as a reason to replay the game in an attempt to get maximum points.

The above image shows how I've taken in game screenshots and simply outlined with the flash pen tool. I find that the irregular lines give the ship a cartoony look which I find pretty aesthetically pleasing. It was also around this point that I realised by leaving the default colour of the ship intact I'd be able to come up with a much better looking final product as, realistically speaking, no matter how much effort I put in my skills will limit how decent the final render will be.

Here I've shown how I turned a screenshot with an outline into a standalone symbol. I've simply used the eraser tool to delete all unnecessary background so I can quickly and easily use the lasso tool to select the plane whilst not getting any of the background. I set up the picture so the outline layer was above the screenshot layer, this allowed me to get a much neater erase as I was able to go slightly into the outline without deleting it and making it seem jagged.

Here you can see what the ship looks like with all eraser work down, I increased the eraser size and zoomed out so I could get more of a margin between the plane that I want to select and the background that I want to leave out.

 Here you can see just how many screenshots I've used for a simple rotate shot. Each one of these screenshots was put into the timeline and carefully outlined.

Whilst trying to script my animation I realised I'd done it all on Actionscript 3.0 rather than the Actionscript 2.0 I've used in the past. This filled me with a deep sense of dread but I soon realised that it's a designed to be a lot simpler for implementing simple commands such as scripting a button to lead you to a certain frame and play on from there. This convenience did of course leave me with a slightly sour taste in my mouth as I soon realised even with the help of online tutorials I lack the skill to put sounds to my animation and one of my buttons, no matter how hard I tried, would not cooperate. Hopefully I'll manage to sort these issues out but failing that I hope my endless hours of toiling on this godforsaken project earn me the pass that I'm after anyway (wink wink).

Above are some images I'm including as they're hopefully a good indication of how useful my earlier sketches were when planning the whole layout for my animation. I was able to put things together efficiently as I could just use onion layers to produce out a neater version of my rough sketches in next to no time. Onion layers really were, and always are when animating on flash,  invaluable as even with my lacking skill when it comes to drawing I could easily sketch out flailing limbs or arrange the various angles of my spaceships without having to skip between slides and faff about with trial and error.

This screen grab shows the mess that is my timeline. This is after I deleted another 20 odd unnamed layers which I'd used to sketch notes and roughly arrange how I wanted things to look. As you can see I've used quite a lot of motion tweens, I used them in a couple of ways, one being to add a slight bit of filler when I didn't really produce enough screenshots of my ships to make everything flow seamlessly. I'm not too fussed with this though, I'm really a fairly poor animator when it comes down to it and using tools such as the motion tween helped me keep a small amount of my sanity. I also used the motion tween tool when sliding things across the screen, such as that very handsome boot above.

I did also make a fair bit of use of royalty free sound effects and songs which I had planned to and hopefully will still be able to implement into the animation. I was slightly frightened that it'd be tough to find the sound effects I needed without having to troll through countless websites but it didn't take me much more than about 15 minutes to find a site that I agreed with.

After a bit of searching I found it was an incredibly easy fix to convert back to Actionscript 2.0 which I swiftly did so I could add sounds to my animation. Ontop of the previously mentioned royalty-free sounds I used I also created quite a few of my own, just where the sounds I was able to find weren't really similar enough to what I was looking for. I did this through recording my voice with Audacity and cutting/pasting where appropriate. I also made use of a number of other tools audacity has such as fade in/outs, distortions and volume levels.

Below is a screenshot showing how I've taken a sound byte from a website and cut it to fit in with the scene I've animated. I had to do this a number of times for most sound effects.

I'm unable to really show this in any way through screenshots but in my animation I've included songs for a certain reason, the opening one is cheery and conveys a sort of upbeat montage feel. I believe this is a decent way to start the animation leading up to the title. The second song, however, is a whole lot more tense as it's put in just after an alarm is sounded to alert of an approaching enemy fleet. I think it builds tension well and the fact that I could let it play fully and have the end point dictated by a mouse click is very effective.

Above I've included a screenshot of some code for a button. As you'll see the code is basic (lucky for me) but entirely effective for what I needed it to do. I simply need it to navigate to a certain frame and play on, whilst also stopping any sounds that may be active. I had to input this code, or one very similar to it at least, for all my buttons.

This is a final screenshot of my project library, if you'll ignore the sheer lack of organisation you'll see just how many different sounds, buttons and symbols I ended up with. It all really did take a massively long time to get together, despite how budget it looks.