So long goodbye, a sign off.

Ok its uploading now and i’ve validated already and they all seem to be valid but now im overwriting there may be more so all thats left is to check that :)

That was tough, at about 4 oclock, i’d done everything but the game manual, and boy was that some effort, I had all my ideas for the game already established but never before did i have to sit down and write them out all togethor detailingly.  Im pretty happy with what i’ve come up with and i hope Rob is too ;) .

its tiring and efforting but it has also been fun. i dont think im going to be continuing this blog, i duno it generally takes a while to write down all your thoughts and such, on a daily/weekly or monthly :S lol basis.

So after a day of ignoring all of Works phone calls, ( i think there was about 6 through the course of the day) im ready to hang up my working boots and putting on my party boots coz its off 2 the aRRRie 2nite! CHill rsl that is.

Its been fun and i look forward to seeing ppl next year. enjoy ur holz, try not 2 get too trashed at new years and mostly enjoy our time off!!!

Wooooot!!! (oh and P.S enjoy this season of gaming goodness!!!! november tis the season !!! Crysis, hellgate, UT3, COD4, and all thats left of the Orange box(twas october but still…))

peace,

-pud9y (Andrew)

WoWGo is Online

ok so i’ve uploaded what i’ve done of the website so far

about half the work is done i think, like the layout and styles are all done so its just a matter of putting in the text for about 5 more pages

http://people.arch.usyd.edu.au/~akur3851/1200home.html

left 2 do:

fill in the news page

make quick start guide/online manual

both media pages : screenshots and demo

and finally an FAQ

pages done:

contact

demo flash popup page

overview

and login

link to demo

crike its past 12 i thought my net would b back up but its still slow :(

n e way after 2 hrs trying to get a loading bar to work its working and here it is

the Interactive Instructional WoWGo Demo

Working hard or hardly working?

I’ve actually been hard at work trying to finish this flash demo and alas its complete. I’ll send it to my user group and hope its either all good or i get some healthy feedback to make final adjustments.

From what i’ve tested of it, i havent found any bugs in it yet but not all the images are that perfect, and since i had to increase the jpeg compression of flash to keep the file size down its not a flawless promotional demo but it will do.

i was thinking about waiting till 2moro when my internet cap comes back to blog (this page took quite a while) but i couldnt wait 2 shout it 2 the world that im almost done! woot!!

now all thats left is the website but i’v got all my ideas for it, just need to implement it, which is actually probably the harder part :P

ill add a link once ive uploaded it

Progress Report

so the hectic week and weekend is finally over *phew*! (refering to assignments and random busyness which is quite frustrating)

but it left me with a slow capped internet so left my blog updates to one bigger one.

right now i’ve almost finished the flash high fid proto, or what i will be calling, ‘Intructional Interactive WoWGo Demo’.

all thats left is shortcuts to bag, menu items, and instructions about friends and contacts list.

should be done by tomorrow and ready to be distributed by the games release date of 2nd November 2007 :D (by that i mean ill fin the flash in time to send them to some of my user group and get some quick feedback on bugs or quirks that can quickly be patched up before release. omg… how good would it b to be a game developer ;) on that note i’ve been playing the hellgate london beta helping them find bugs before its release in about a week, great game… n e way bak onto the subject!!)

i also have a few ideas for my website including a graphics behind the nav bar thing, improved bakcgrounds and main body text (most of this rumble will be notes to self) in high tower font (found to be close to WoWs font) and a large first letter of a paragraph. also some glam to the nav bar which will prove to be beneficial, hav a rollover popup thing. home maybe lead to a news page, Info will lead to ‘game overview’ and ‘online game manual’, Media will link to ’screenshots’ and ‘demo’, and then there will finally be a fake account login.

news page will hav latest post being WoWGo is released, and some others being WoWGo pre-orders have gone gold, have gone platinum, beta testing started etc… fun fun

and online game manual page will include probably just a quick start guide like explaining UI customization and PVP as well as items, and pretty much anything different to the original WoW.

(o yeh and i managed to pick-up a copy of the real WoW’s game manual on the weekend, so i’ve been referencing that because i dont actuli hav the game to play with)

also just thought maybe WoWGo can be an extra subscripiton fee ontop of your WoW account but not a seperate subscription. kinda like the booster packs and expansions of current games, these WoWGo players can have different coloured names or alternate skins in the original game, creating insentives and using techniques of real game developers and their promotion of expansions.

prototype updates

since the next few days i wont be doing any more work on my prototype or 1200 i thought i’d take this opportunity to state some specific changes

after a few poeple played with my prototype many of them didnt realise what/where the rotate button was, so i have made the symbol more recognisable and a caption above sayin click below instead of click the rotate button

better quality of the main UI 

i also have made the buttons a little bigger.

the shortcut to backpack or bag icons however have been shrunk from the original proto because i realised there were 5 squares instead of 4 in WoW. although a lot smaller i dont believe this will hinder much on the user being able to press the buttons because they are relatively bigger than the iphones on screen keyboard letters.

however ill present this to some of my user testers to see if they feel comfortable with the size, and if not integrate that back into the UI customisation feature.

also updated a little more graphics and fonts to make it look less like a dodgy cut out of wow screenshots

There was also a glitch in flash that i couldnt resolve, i had initially wanted the buttons when cliked on to appear ontop so they wouldnt appear to be behind other buttons when pressed (buttons enlarge when clicked on). by using actionscript i was able to achieve this (3 hrs later) by increasing the depth/level of the clip to bring it to the top, however this caused some strange problem to cause one button to stay onscreen no matter what scene it was jumped to :S. so i just took this actionscript feature out. Drew told me that it being a prototype i shouldnt worry too much about it so i’ve left it out and i dont think its going back in

 you can compare the old proto and current new proto below, but like i said in the previous post, there is still a lot of work to do on it and thankyfully this extension was brought out (i think its only fair that we got an extra week since rob took about that time to release our marks after he said we would get them :P)

old proto ~200kb

new proto current state ~500kb (it somehow more than doubled in size, i think i have some redundant images in the library)

things still needed:

zoomable map

example of battle interface and screenshot

explanations of what each button does compared to the games original counterpart

sumhow show WoWGo’s social networking abilities (the phone calls etc)

and examples of customizable UI

filling the gap

if you do want to know what i have been doing if not working on the project,

heres a picture of my snail for deco1008!!

am i truly focused? final prototype still requires some work

after actually thinking about what i needed for the final prototype compared to my current prototype i realised there was actually a lot more work to do. and i havnt truly been focusing on deco1200 so the prototype is still a while away.

i’ve managed to get most of the images i needed for the flash, so now its just a matter of puttin them togethor and linking the buttons to the appropriate scenes and frames. and the news of the minisite 3’s extensions is like news of a storm to the farmer, and its raining cats, pet food and dogs! (sorry lol its got “separate multiple tags with commas: cats, pet food, dogs” below the typing field).

but im still not sure whether i need to include every aspect of WoWGo in this prototype? or just a link to it and an explanation of what it does when there is a link.

ie theres is a link to audio and video settings in the WoWGo menu, would this just explain what this button is for when clickd on? or would i have to implement where the button actuly goes to and what the settings look like? because to implement the latter will require an almost exponential amount of work when its really not required (where an explanation would achieve the same results for the user).

i guess i will just see how much time i have available

im alive!

ok so the probable reason there hasnt been a blog in a long while was because i wanted to discuss all my changes in the presentations :D like as a surprise you know?

hmm but other reasons could include busyness, tiredness, and the fact i was rushing to do many few assignments at once didnt leave much time to blog.

as for the rest of our class… i think the holidays mustv done something, somedays i just forgot we even had a blog, not because of the holidays (were they really much of a holiday?) but just from all-round busyness.

 ok but now its time to blog since there arent any more presentations, the next one is the big one!

ill finish the full prototype in the coming days and present them to a few of my feedback’ers and see if any adjustments are needed. after that its to work on the website which i dont think needs much work, does it? Justin didnt really say much about it when showing the class but he just didnt look too satisfied with it haha, maybe it wasnt mac enough for him. might just fix some of the font and less text and more pics

 i was also thinking of a iphone splash screen, where clicking safari leads to the main website while clicking a WoWGo logo would link to the prototype? i dont know we shall see…

untitled (2007)

damn, its been 2 weeks since i posted last????

yikes so wats been happening…

last post i was lost playing WoW, as well as gettin all these assignments dun and website fin. now its holz and my 10day trial has run out which i am so relieved of.

sum stuff 2 mention, i wasnt sure to include this in my website or not but i ended up not including it because i dont know how its directly going to influence the project but here it is. i found a world of warcraft census:

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php 

showing the population of each race and class and wat level the majority is etc…

also would like to note to myself to make the prototype a little better, i kind of didnt get enough time to accomplish wat i wanted in that first prototype and not too sure if im allowed to be using real icons from the game either

what else? :S umm oh yer i’v gotten more results for that wow poll and also g2 remember to setup some interviews these holidays.