Planning

The first step was to plan what I wanted to make in Flash, this needed me to do some research into current characters and see different positions etc... and look into how they worked and all of the different parts that are attached to one character, different arm positions etc...

I made 2 documents that illustrate 2 popular game characters in a variety of different stances and views, this gave me a good idea of what my character needed to be like...

Master Chief - Research



Mario - Research



With this in mind I made a few sketches of different characters that I had thought of, one was a furry monster, one was a shark, and one was the robot that I have picked for my final piece,

There were several reasons why the first 2 were not picked for my final piece, these included, being difficult to animate and draw, and nothing that they could really do except move around, this is why the Robot was a good idea as it allowed for me to create the spare parts which can be swapped and changed around to allow for the user to create the robot themselves using different parts of its character model, and there were more options for animation if any were to be incorporated.

The initial sketches are shown below:

Shark



Robot

Monster

Once the character of the Robot had been finalised as my final choice I proceeded to make a storyboard for the characters animations and interactivity, this storyboard outlined all of the major assets that were to be used and what each button/asset did on the main scene

Storyboard

Now that planning was complete I could go into flash and start building my character.