Production Diary

Stimulus

The brief I chose for this criteria was the Astronomy game for 8 - 11 year olds. The reason for me choosing this game is because I little prior knowledge of space, more so about our solar system as I used to have a poster on my wall as a child that I found really interesting. That said I specially chose to talk about the three closest planets to our sun.


Ideas

Once my mind was settled on basing the game on the three closest planets to the sun, I gathered a bit of research on our solar system and the three planets: Mercury, Venus and Earth as well as a bit of research on our Sun.


Assets

The used in my game are 4 images: Mercury, Venus, Earth and The Sun (all of which I created on Photoshop using visual effects, the original images were copyright free images on Google).

My titlescreen background was also created in the same manner as the other images.


Legal and Ethical Considerations

My game will have only appropriate content for my target audience, it won't have any violence or foul language, just interesting facts concerning the planets used.


Product Specification

The first scene I created was for the title screen, the plan for this scene was that the background be filled with stars and have the three game titles bulletpointed as if they were one of the stars. The titles to each game being the following:

Solar System - This is a timeline showing the distance between the planets involved

Drag and Drop - This is a game where you must drag the right answers to the right picture.

Hangman - This is a game in which you have to guess fill in the blanks with the correct letters, if you get too many wrong then a wormhole appears and swallows you.



This was the end result, to which I am quite happy with and out of each scene this is the only one I wouldn't change even if I had more time to work on it.

Using Flash's actionscript commands, I was able to turn the bulletpoints into buttons that would connect me to the others scenes I would create to for each game. This was possible using the code - on(release){gotoAndStop("h_o_g"); - h_o_g being the name label of the frames in the scene "Solar System". This same method was also used to connect the title screen to the other scenes and vice-versa too.

Here's an image of how the button to the title screen looks. The part of this code that makes it different from the others is the part - ("main_menu"); - this part refers to the name label on the title screen.

The next coding was for the timeline on the Solar System scene, the timeline is basically what I used to compare the distance of the selected planets to the Sun. Placing 3 points on one line I coded each planet to align with each each point. On top of aligning each planet I also placed one or two facts relating to them. Here's an image of how the actionscript on this scene looks like...

This is the code that allows each planet to align on the timeline. 

Note the on the actionscript the forth line says - var games:Array = ["chess", "space_invaders", "call_of_duty"] - These are the labels placed on each planet, the reason they have names irrelevent to planets though is because I used them on a test timeline whilst learning the code. 

chess is in place of Earth

space_invaders is in place of Venus

call_of_duty is in place of Mercury

Here is how the timeline looks without the bulletpoints (or markers) being highlighted.

And here's is how it looks after a planet aligns itself. Displaying its order and a few facts.

The coding for this scene makes it so when the right words are matched to the right pictures, the word correct will be displayed. 

Here's the Drag and Drop scene for my game. The name's on the side are what need to be dragged to each respective planet, however there's a little trick to this game and the right answer to one of these is the only wrong answer available. In this scene the planet and Sun have been animated to rotate and move up, down, left or right.

For the hangman game, I had to code each individual letter so that not only would clicking on them demand a response but also an image of a The Milky Way (would either gradually appear with each wrong letter or fully appear with a congratulations message). If you look at the actionscript, you'll see that I had to code it so the words would only appear after the correct letters are selected and until they are clicked their visibility will remain "false".

When the right letter (or key) is pressed the visibility for that letter becomes "true", meaning it they will gradually appear until all of the words are revealed.

Here's how the hangman scene will look.

Criteria 2 - Research for Flash Game (Astronomy)

Research on astronomy for my Flash game...

For my flash game on astronomy I plan to use the three closest planets to the sun: Mercury, Venus and Earth...


Mercury



First interesting fact about Mercury is its most relevant to my flash game, Mercury is in fact the closest planet to the Sun in our solar system. Surprisingly mankind has known about its existence since ancient times of 300 BC, the Greeks even referring to it as, Apollo and Hermes (which mean morning and evening star). Unlike Earth and other planets in our solar system, Mercury has no known moon or satellites orbiting it, 1 day there is comparable to 58 on Earth and it only takes 88 days to orbit the Sun.


Venus



Venus is the second closest planet to the Sun, and strangely enough it is the hottest among all of the planets surrounding our Sun, even more so than Mercury which is the closest. The reason Venus is so hot is because its atmosphere is predominantly composed f carbon dioxide which is a major greenhouse gas, meaning that it traps the Suns' heat in its atmosphere like an oven. Due to Venus being so hot it cannot sustain liquids like water that evaporate at such high temperatures. Venus is very similar to Earth in both size (it's 95% the size of Earth) and density. Venus is also another planet with no known satellites or moons.


Earth



First fact about Earth is... It is the planet you're living on right now, along with every other species. Earth is the third closest planet to the Sun and it is the fifth largest in our solar system, losing out only to the Gas Giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Even after many years of research and exploration, Earth is still the only planet known to harbor life on it (once again, us!) and for the most part is covered in water. As you mostly know by now, Earth has  season: Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. These seasons are caused by the Earth axis of rotation tilting 23 degrees, and have a drastic change on the weather and climate (relating to changes temperatures).


The Sun



Our Sun has inspired mankind to create many mythologies that almost all cultures across the world have adopted at some point. This includes the Egyptians, Chinese, Native Americans, Aztecs and Japanese (even worshiping it as a God). The Sun is actually a star meaning that it is a colossal mass of burning gases that bind together under it's incredible gravity, this comparison seems a little far'fetched at first thought considering one can see stars at night unlike the Sun and they appear tiny and in great numbers covering the entire. The reasons for this is because even though many of these stars are relatively the same size as ours or larger, they are so far away from this planet a glimmer of their light is the all we can see of them.

This concludes my research on the three closest planets to the Sun.