Resolution Woes

So i make a good amount of graphics in Photoshop, and have sycned together about 3min worth of video into a swf.

i sit back and realise that the ui is rather cluttered but if i make them any smaller the text will be hard to read so i decide 800x600 is probably a bad choice as no one would really play an MMO in this day and age.

I scrap the whole thing and start it again in 1024x768 which is much more accurate to todays minimum standard screen size, i will probably have to re-encode the videos and audio to a lower quality as i dont want to have a 20-30mb swf file. It also means i get to remake all my graphics in photoshop again...meh!

Joys of Photoshop

So ive got a few minutes of edited footage which i plan to overlay a custom made UI in flash.

After doing some mock ups with simple shapes to get a rough outline of the placement of things i set to work making some graphics in photoshop as i could achieve a lot more than with the tools in flash (this does however leave me with the problem that they are not vectors and any resizing will make them look totally rubbish, but im going to have to stick with this as im not able to achieve my ideas in flash)

im starting to realise making simple boxes in photoshop is a lot more time consuming than i first realised.

Progress begins!

Ive got a few more ideas drawn out on paper and ive started to put together the design document however at the moment its still quite a wall of text and in no real order with just a few comparison screenshots

ive got a rough idea in my head how my movie will be (ive opted for a movie with it stopping at certain frames to explain whats going on, because doing something interactive with an online game would be too hard due to not being able to pause or have any control of other people in the game. I will probably add something interactive later on if it will increase my marks but for now i just want the bulk of the .swf starting on.) So with this in mind ive been able to fraps some material and edit them in Premiere Pro (reducing the load time and removing parts where the ui wasnt able to be hidden)

ill report back when i start making some graphics!

Ideas for the Brief

so we got our brief outline, and we have to redesign a ui for a current game out there in the market or make a ui for our own game.

I've decided to work on FFXI as ive played a lot of mmo's and i feel due to this experience i have an idea of what mmo players would like (ofcourse i cant please everyone but i dont think its a bad thing to make it more user friendly) .

I felt FFXI would be a good game to work on as the UI in this game is all based around being quite hidden and macro dependant, once the player gets used to this im sure it works well, but im trying to make it appeal more to newer players who need more visual feedback.

all ive got done at the moment is a few general ideas and some sketches drawn out on a paper so nothing much else to report about at the moment