Drawing In Flash

I became frustrated trying to trace over the vacuum so I just made a better looking one. After I did that I made various states for the vacuum health. The only problem there was that one frame still had the hose from my first attempt at a vacuum with flash stuck to it. I waited until the last second to finish this because I dreaded tracing the boy. Speaking of the main character, the boy's hand looked terrible. I couldn't make it with the pen tool like I did with most of him, but instead used the pencil feature to draw his hand right side up, tilted itm and attached it to his arm. It may look off because it isn't as thick as the rest of his body, but this is the best I've done for anything's hand on any pc program.

My button that plays all vacuum animations was coded at the very last second before the Drinko Library closed. Either it doesn't work or I uploaded the wrong flash file. After I coded it I fled the library because I didn't want to get locked in or have someone escort me off of my pc. Initially I was going to have the controls mapped and display every state of everything one would see in the paper prototype. Then I realized a big flaw with my game: how does a teenager punching a vacuum hose hurt the vacuum itself? During the last class I spoke with Danny about this he asked me 'Well what breaks a vacuum' and I told him 'something that clogs up the vacuum'. I'm going to redraw or re-imagine the bully character all together. The bully or whoever needs to throw things at the vacuum hose allowing the kid throw something back at the object with the vacuum.

Adding Sound

Originally I was going to do this as two projects, but I thought that this would save some time. The tutorials for these two projects helped me out immensely! I made a button and used a motion tween to show the difference for when one scrolls over it, clicks, and for when its not in use. I also went to the 'down' frame in the sound layer of the button and dragged the whistle sound from the library onto the stage. I was very lazy when it came to my dog. I made a movie for only two states of the dog. The dog's trail starts and ends off of screen due to my fear of coding a boundry incorrectly (this is all due Friday and I have 2 hours left before the Drinko Library with Flash shuts down, I don't care to owe $250 to my mom for Adobe Flash CS4 even though I get paid next week). I'm surprised how well this turned out with so little coding. I'm used to coding everything and a half in Visual Basic.

Adding Animation

This helped me out for adding interaction with my button. Until I started this I never considered using a tween to fade something in and out. I made a jumping jack stick figure, used a motion tween for a box moving across the screen, and a motion tween to fade a circle. I didn't have any problems with this one.

Adding NAVIGATION

At first I thought this was actually really easy compared to drawing in flash. After I had the two codes correct I just put in the desired button and frame into the code. The only thing that gave me any trouble was trying to figure out what made my 'previous' button go back. I tried the words last, earlier, previous, and before. It was not until I noticed blue appeared on 'prev' as I was backspacing it before I realized what I should put in.

Then I learned that my 'back to start' button didn't work correctly. I tried everything!!! I made another layer, copied the button to the rectangle layer, locked/unlocked layers, added 'stop ();' to every rectangle, copied the start button frame multiple times, added 'stop ();' to the start button frames, and I learned that 'GotoAndStop' doesn't work for snot. I can't get it to work!!!!!!

I'm typing this on a different day from the above paragraphs. I emailed my professor and he responded to this blog with some great advice. Before I checked I figured it out. I needed a 1 between the () after GotoAndStop. That is a really silly error, but I'm past that and am on to another project.

P.S. I was so tired when I first wrote this post that I save it as Adding Animation when it should have been Adding Navigation