Post 23rd july, bail out plan, and final two weeks overview.

As mentioned in my previous post, G4 productions agreed on a bail out plan which included several changes that affected the content of the game in terms of quantity, game-play, and play time.

"We ended up with a game that is visually similar to our planned one, lacking a couple of pages and extra cut scenes. Despite that, the main objective was altered so much that I felt our game isn't actually the same game we sat out in our design document. The reason for that being the elimination of the 3 key items that were supposed to be obtained after the completion of each level, as well as the cancellation of level 3 maze and replacing it with a much simpler one. The boss stage and all the awesomeness in the finale were also scrapped."

During week 11, intensive work had been happening, Abbas, the lead designer, drew a substitute  maze for level 3, and then handed me a copy so that I could trace the lines, apply the background and interface, and then send it to Mohammed. In a way, it's similar to our old workflow only this the time, the flow is faster and energetic; more effort is being put into trying to finish the game by next Thursday, June 30th.

Original maze 1 drawing from Abbas

While Tracing the lines in Flash by making a symbol called 'wall which has a single line, and then copying and modifying several copies of the symbol to complete the tracing.'.

Level 1 completed. Note: The color red was just to distinguish my tracing from the original drawing, the final color will be black.

Maze 3 drawing from Abbas.

Changed the 'wall' symbol temporarily to red to be able distinguish between the drawing and the symbol while tracing.

Maze 3 completed, with changes in the ladders' drawing because I thought problems would arise when placing the invsible borders around the original borders which were curved.

After completion of these two stages, Mr.coder did his job and by Thursday, we had a working prototype of the 3 playable stages. A week ago, the game development was catastrophic, but a week later, we had finaly finished compiling all of the mazes! Mr.Owen seemed pleased this time and thought we have done ok.

This week, week 12, is the final; fortuantly, all we had to do was add the additional pages and cutcenes. Abbas fixed the logo, added the opening and ending cut scene animation, as well as the stage complete pages. He then gave me a copy in which I did the following:

The project kept showing errors and was crashing often, I then identified the problem, it was with my sound effect that came with the logo animation.

As always, I'm the content manager dude, I bring everything together.*Paromath: "bragger!!"*

Unfortunately, labeling out the main timeline and putting each page's symbol turned out to be the inappropriate technique to display the pages correctly. Right now, transitions to different pages are being done by adding and removing child in action scripts, and there isn't much time to figure out another way to do it, therefore, this has been changed.

The instructions page. I tried making it look as if some student just came and wrote in the notebook by aligning the texts with the lines.

Finaly,even though it's late, I think I can focus on my role and gather the sound effects and make the real theme song! hopefully by today 7th july (it's 12:30am right now) we'll be doing the final proofreading, debugging, and add sounds and submit!