Evaluation

All in all I really like my banner, I think it's fun and interesting and I like the whole nostalgic game look with the font and black and green colours. If I could do it again though I'd try to add the timer and a scoreboard and also maybe a little tune that sounds like the pacman theme to play in the background but I'd have to put in a mute button so it doesn't annoy people. But in conclusion I really like my banner and this whole project was funner then expected.

final banner

My web banner

Banner Idea's:

•  Most of us are gamers
• Final fantasy 7
• WoW
• one person shooters
• older games everyone knows
• mario 
• sonic 
• pacman
• make banner fun
• have a game
• interactive
• A Mario coming in and out of tunnels
• Pacman 
• Pokemon 

In the end I decided to base my banner around pacman because our course is 'interactive media and game art's' and pacman is a game most people are familiar with old or young. Making the whole game would be hard though and I think it would give the feeling were just a game art coerce so I made a simple point and click game instead. This got across the interactive media aspect but not completely so I decided to have three pacman ghosts one for each of the main adobe programs we use.

With help from the references I had I made a quick plan for the banner and the ghosts in photoshop.

I then moved on to making all the components I need in photoshop like the background with the college logo, the text and the ghosts.

After I finished these I imported all the files to flash and set them all up using the codes from the text files until I has a score box that went up by one every time you clicked on any of the ghosts. I then went into each ghost as a movie clip and made it disappear after 20 frames for 20 frames and then go to a random place using math.random between 600 by 100 px . I was happy with this banner but when I had Lee and Aj beta test it I decided I should make it better as it was a bit random, how did they know to click on the ghosts? They also said it was annoying when the ghosts went over the course name or the link to the college website. The ghost's were moving a bit too quick as well and Aj said it was far too easy to click on them.

I decided to have a frame before the game frame with a start button just to make it look better and I cut down on the number of frames inside the ghost's before they disappear to 14 and I narrowed down the area where they appear so it's not over the text or button. I  was originally going to also have a 30 second timer but I don't know how to make one.

Experimenting in flash

Today we learnt how to program a hit into flash, first we made a movie clip called 'target' and made a  classic motion guide for it to follow, we positioned the target a third of the way along on every 50 frames and then tweened it.  Now our target moved around and we added the code for a hit, first we selected the target and went into code snippets and chose any click action to get the

'Target.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, fl_ClickToHide);

function fl_ClickToHide(event:MouseEvent):void' 

bit, we then got rid of the action and put 'trace("HIT")' instead which means that every time you click on target 'HIT' comes up in the output box.

We used this again in our second test file where we made a score function. First we made a 'dynamic text' text box and called it scoreText we then used the same code as last time but instead of


{
trace("HIT")
}
 we put

{
score +=  1;
scoreText.text = "SCORE " + String(score);
}

which adds one to the variable called scoreText whenever you click on the target.

We finally added this last bit of code which tells flash that the variable score starts at 0.

var score:Number = 0;
scoreText.text = "SCORE " + String(score);

Web banner research

This is the first web banner I found, I think it's a bad one because it's not just eye catching, it's annoying, the bright colours are irritating and it makes it hard to focus on the website. The text is hard to read and you can't tell what there selling at first glance, it also looks very ametur, like a preset in a cheap design program. Also from a distance it just looks like a orange blur, nothing stands out.

This is is my favourite banner because although the contrast with the green and black makes the text stand out, the banner isn't in your face and annoying, unfourtunatly the banner has no pictures but with the text 'Xbox 360 games' the focus it becomes obvious what there selling, this design also looks really stylish with a simple modern looking with a simple yet high contrast colour scheme which stand out without blinding you.

This is another example of a bad web banner design, the images are good but the text is really hard to read, the colour doesn't stand out at all and the font is too fancy, it would look better on a plain background not against a detailed one, even then it's hard to read at a glance. Also the text under the main text is stupidly small and even harder to read, also it's hard to tell what there selling, I assume it's food but the text says 'The Pioneer Woman, plowing through life in the country . . .one calf nut at a time" well what does that mean? This is a really stupid thing to do as if you can't even work out what there selling then no-one will click on it.

This is another good banner as although it's bright it's not over the top and has a good variety of colours to give it life, it's also animated which adds to the whole 'festival' theme. The text doesn't really stand out so at first I thought it was selling the car but when you look closer you see it's advertising a festival. The image has a good high contrast colour scheme which lets important things in the banner stand out against the background colour scheme with out being too high contrast and burning your eyes out.