Final

This is my final game. I have added sounds to it and finished off dodgey buttons etc. The safe i added near the end uses 6 different movie clips to make it work. It has 3 movie clips which are the numbers that each have 10 frames. These frames have the numbers 0 - 9 on them which act as a combination lock. There are also 3 invisible buttons over the handle movie click which doesnt let you open the safe until you have got the right combo because when a certain frame is clicked on, on the combo, it will take away the invisble buttons so that you can unlock the handle. There is a few minor glitches in, mainly useability issues, such as the back buttons that link each scene are in a few random places but other than that it is alrirght. A slightly larger issue is that once you have found the key you can then unlock the door in the hallway, but once you try to go back from the hallway it takes you back to the first scene when you do NOT have the key because i left the coding from the first scene on the back button. I did change this code to the correct coding but the flash file corrupted and it wiped my whole days work, luckily i already had this finished piece which only has that one issue but it is an SWF file so i can't edit it. It only means that you have to get the key again in order to get into the bedroom so it's not a huge deal. Other than this issue i am quite happy with the game and have had someone test it and they seemed to enjoy it.

Early ideas for my game (they were in a book, so i'm writing them on here)

From the start of my final major project i wanted to do some sort of game, whether it be in flash or Unity. I mainly wanted to use Unity just because i really enjoy 3D modelling in Cinema 4D. I wanted it to be a horror game and i had been reminded of a game i have watched a lot of on youtube called Amnesia. Straight away i knew i wanted to do a castle based horror game. I decided to do an exploration type game, firstly i started doing a point and click game, which shortly turned out to be sort of and interactive comic type point and click adventure. Before all this though I started modelling a castle door which was set in a thick stone wall pictured below.

I also started trying to get to grips with Unity, doing a few tutorials and looking at videos on youtube of how to get started. I managed to come up with the concept for the mountain and the surroundings for it. Note: There was going to be water in the vast area below the mountain and a small pier where the path starts up to the top of the mountain. And of course the castle would be on top.

I do really like Unity and i think i could make a playable small game in it if i had the time but because there was a limited amount of time for the final project i decided it wasn't the best time to start playing around in a brand new program and do it in something i was familiar with like flash.

materials and rooms

The picture below is what inspired me to do the dungeon room in the main castle room under the carpet. It looks very dark, cold and creepy and would make an excellent dungeon so i made my own type and changed it around. I really like the rocks mainly because it gives the sense that this place is not for amusement and only torture.

I also had to look at chandeliers which would go nicely in an old castle and i used the picture below for reference because it looks antique and quite spooky in a way, with the dark metal ad the surrounding candles.

Below is a picture that matches my castle entrance hall in my game, i didn't use this as a reference but this is the sort of look i was going for in my mind. Also the wooden panelling i didn't use in the main hall but i did use this style of wall and ceiling in my secret room behind the bookcase in the bedroom.

Characters in my game (with research)

There are very few actual characters in my game, i think 3 overall, but i wanted them to have a purpose and not be randomly tried to fit in to the game. The first one is the head that pops up when you try to click on a door. It has part of the spinal cord hanging out and i have drawn it in my sketchbook for reference. The second one the player should come across is a ghost which comes out of a jail cell when the door falls down after clicking it.

And finally theres the picture of the warden and of course his skeleton hanging off the rock beneath the castle. I have drawn all these in my sketchbook. Below is some character research.

Above is my severed head reference, there isn't a lot of severed cartoon heads online i must admit so i pretty much made mine up.

Above is a ghost i found which inspired me for the design of the ghost i have in my game.

The skeleton below i used as a reference for my skeletons i have in the castle and outside at the bottom of the cliff.

I uploaded this because i flash kept on crashing and deleting all my work i had done on my game that day. So i re-did all the 3 hours of work i had done that got deleted and uploaded it before flash crashed again. This is NOT the finished piece.

trouble with coding

Today in my final project i was having extreme difficulty getting a movie clip to go to another scene on the release of the mouse. I struggled trying different types of coding and playing around with the movie clips and everything, but i just could not get it to work. First of all i was trying to get the end of an animation in a movie clip to go straight to the next scene, frame 7 by putting the coding, _root.gotoAndStop("Scene 2", 7); This however did nothing except go to the 7th frame of the movie clip animation that was already playing. I tried a whole bunch of variations of this code and even took out the animation completely and just had it so that the movie clip went straight to the next scene on release of the mouse button using, on (release) {_root.gotoAndStop("Scene 2", 7); Again this didn't recognize the scene part so i tried renaming the scene (and tried many variations of coding yet again) which still didn't work. So after this i finally found something that helped online which basically says to put a frame label on the frame you wish to go to on the next scene. I did this by naming it "rock" and starting trying different coding and eventually found that,  on (release) {_root.gotoAndPlay("rock"); worked after putting it straight onto the main movie clip. This did however sacrifice the animation that went with the movie clip but i successfully made it go to the next scene and have put the animation at the start of the next scene.

Game research

Ive been looking for good point and click games/interactive games. I found one called monkey go happy which is a series of scenes with different puzzles, which some of them are quite funny, it really involves the player and even lets you pick a character to play as.

Some of the puzzles are just finding shapes and matching them.

But other ones you have to find a out what to do for example the one below you have to unlock the chicken coop, click on him to fly away and then put the eggs underneath him in the basket.

as pictured below.