15.04.10: Right hand down

In remembrance of my Designing for the User project in semester 3 (found athttp://www.newmedia.artdesignhull.ac.uk/rhughes/year-two/semester-three/dftu.html), I have begun to develop another aspect of the interactive video which will act as my final piece.While the GUI wasn’t great, there was one part of the DFTU project I really enjoyed and I think the tutor who marked it found quite fun too. To give a view of the player’s ‘heads up display’ (HUD), showing information relating to gameplay such as ammunition and compass direction, I mocked-up a first-person view of the player character holding a gun. You could then click on areas of the background and make the weapon fire and reload, knocking over a distant guard. I have decided to create a similar set of interactive animations for the FMP, while it will be more polished and stylised.

I have started by drawing the cartoon arm and pistol in the recurring style of the environment art, which took the best part of a day!! The perspective was pretty challenging but I think I’ve included enough detail for it to work. This was my first experiment with detailed colouring in Photoshop and it took a while to refine the tonal shading across the shapes of the arm and gun.

I then imported the image into Flash and developed the first two animations. It now starts with a simple bobbing motion to simulate breathing and by pressing on a specific part of the screen the gun will fire; with the weapon recoiling back, cartoon smoke emanating from the barrel and firing mechanism and the arm then lowering and moving around to look like reloading.

With sounds and an impact somewhere on the screen such as an object being broken, I think this could be a really fun part of the final piece for the user.

The background of the screenshots also shows how I intend to use the Sketchup environments. As the textures are all hand drawn in the same cartoony style, they will work perfectly as backdrops to these other interactive sections of the video.