Today, I am happy to announce that

my Interactive Programming project

for this semester is finished! The last of the programming is complete, and all the glitches have been dealt with. Charlie is now capable of walking left and right depending on which buttons the user presses, and he can jump when the user presses the up directional button. The character is now unable to walk outside of the movement zone and can no longer walk beyond the edges of the forest. He interacts with two objects - a bunch of cables, which causes a bird to appear, and a colour-changing mushroom - and he breathes and tilts his head when he’s idle.

The main issues I faced in the past two weeks have been to do with program failures, absurdly large files, and extreme lag. These were largely the result of importing illustrator files into Flash CC, which created thousands of movieclip layers. The best solution I found to this problem was sacrificing vector graphics, and replacing them with flattened PNGs.

This project has certainly been challenging, but nonetheless I had a lot of fun with it. I learned a lot from the process of completing it, and I’d like to create something similar with a new character in a new environment.

Click

here

 to download the program and use the directional buttons on your keyboard to try it out for yourself.

If the link above doesn't work, try this: http://www.penandpixel.ie/#submissions[portfolio]/17/