Interactive Project

This was my first project on my Multimedia course. We had to create a interactive space where visitors could make decisions through branching and looping and navigate through a series of images.  When discussing in an seminar about general ideas for the project I immediately had an idea about what I wanted to do. Instead of just using digital still images I wanted to do my projects with images I had created in Photoshop. The idea came from a game I had played several years ago called The Crimson Room. It was an interactive game where the user had to click on certain points in a room to navigate around it and try to escape. The images were very basic at the time and created on a program such as paint but it gave me an idea. I wanted to do a similar project but I had an idea where the user would get trapped in a computer and would have to navigate their way out. This would allow me to mix up digital still images and images I had created on Photoshop. As the laptop in the pictures was a Mac book Pro I started off by researching several icons that would be on those machines such as the Mac Finder and also some other common ones for programs such as Firefox. After this I started sketching several ideas for what I would include in my images. As my idea was based around being stuck inside the computer I thought of a few ideas such as the Firefox logo coming alive. Although I never used that idea in my final piece of work it helped spark a few ideas and similar things were included in my final design. After getting my ideas together I planned the layout of the pages to get an idea of the time needed and also which page leads to which as well as branching. This also helped a lot when it come down to implementing the html code as I could easily refer back to the plan and see what was needed to be done.  After completing it and testing it to see if everything worked I shown it to my lecturer who gave me some constructive criticism stating that although the idea was good, the user goes from one area to the other too quick. So to improve on this I would have to make more images to lengthen the interaction. This is something I am looking to improve on. It was also noted the images were of the wrong resolution to what the brief stated so this is also something that I will have to adjust.