Flash Progress Review

Flash Progress Review

Today we were tasked with finding a professional example of a flash interface either for an interactive website or for an online game, i decided to use two examples, one of a online game and the other of an interactive website. 

And also to review the current version of our flash interface (whether it is finished and complete or not), but because i have lost my flash interface and cannot find a recent copy of it i have chosen to review the last known version and state of my interface.

Looking at a professional example

Below is a professional example of a flash interface in the form of a game.

The End

The End is a free online flash game that combines simple strategy interaction and puzzle's with platforming elements to make for a simple but effective and highly addictive game produced by Channel 4 and created by BAFTA winning games studio Preloaded.
The game runs smoothly and while it may be a simple game it offers a lot of interaction with the flash interface through the character creator that you are taken to when first playing the game. It is a good professional example of a flash based user interface.

The website for the game and the trailer are below

http://www.playtheend.com/

Scan.co.uk

Scan is an online computer store that specialises in computer hardware, software at an affordable price for UK customers, as most major online computer retailers are based in europe, asia or more commonly in the US.

The interface for the website uses flash for all the drop down menus, selections, adverts and the interactive banners. It is an easy to use interface with very few if any glitches or bugs. All this and more makes it a good professional example of a flash based user interface.

The website and a screenshot of the user interface are below

http://www.scan.co.uk/

Flash HCI - Progress

04/10/2012

Over the past 2 weeks we have been creating our Human Computer Interface using flash. Lately we have been creating our HCI icons and adding them into flash as fully interactive buttons.

These icons will be used to identify key points of interest along the routs used by our client for their Multi-Story Water Project.

Because these HCI's have to be accessible to anyone in the public we needed to make sure that the ideas and concepts for our icons were easy to identify and not too complicated. This meant designing them to follow basic recognizable elements used in icons on other forms of software and websites, such as Audio Control, which is usually shown as a speaker with several lines coming out of it to show whether there is sound coming out and how high the sound is. Or a back button in the form of an arrow or symbol that is identified with the previous page such as an image of a map to identify the back to the map icon.

The designs for my icons and HCI follow a dark industrialized theme, hence why i named the design 'Dark' and was to symbolize the dark technological boom in society that was Britain in the time of the industrial revolution.

Converting the icons to buttons has been the most difficult part of designing our HCI's thus far, as in many cases we had to recreate our icons in flash after drawing them by hand then editing them in Photoshop  Also applying the coding to the buttons to make them work and successfully interact with the different scenes and buttons inside the HCI's.