Evaluation

When I first started this project, I didn't really know what to expect, and thought it was going to be a lot more technical than it actually was.

I found researching the Crystal Maze very interesting, as I've always loved gameshows, and I was interested in learning about a gameshow I have never seen before. I also enjoyed watching episodes of the Crystal Maze, some of them were very funny, and I felt in a lot of them, they only invited people who, let's say, weren't the sharpest tools in the shed.

Was also interesting learning about user interfaces and what they're used for in games. This also helped me to appreciate even the most simple things that appear in games, which may take weeks to design.

Doing my initial drawings was good, as I'd say the parts I enjoy the most in the projects I have to do at college are the parts I get to be the most creative and make my own choices. I also found this tough when drawing my initial designs from home, as I lost the checklist that had the list of things I needed to design for this project, and I couldn't remember exactly everything that was on the checklist so I probably did draw some designs I didn't really need to. I also found creating the 'Weapon' display confusing, as I wasn't sure if we had to create an actual weapon, and at first I thought that what was listed next to the weapon on the list (pistol, knife, crowbar) were just weapon examples, not what we had to include in an actual weapon display, which is what I realised later. However, I wasn't too worried about UIs that I didn't do initial drawings for, as I had clear plans that I could use instead of using fancy designs (things such as lives display and how we can tell which 'zone' we would be currently in) which could have resulted in making these simple things look too complicated and confusing, which is not good when designing things that should focus more on how they work than the design of them.

After drawing my initial designs, we then had to recreate our designs in Photoshop. However, I decided to recreate my designs using Adobe Illustrator, as I find it much easier to design things using Illustrator, and I also felt it would be more appropriate for the designs I wanted to create to use Illustrator. Another good reason why I used Illustrator is that I knew from previous experience that you can open up files created in Illustrator in Photoshop, which I would use later to add colour to my designs, and edit them slightly, if necessary. However, before this project it had been a while since I last used Illustrator, so at first I was a little bit rusty when using Illustrator, but soon felt fine with the program. I also felt a little bit rushed while creating my designs using Illustrator at college because I don't have Illustrator at home, so I wanted to make sure I had made as many designs as possible before the end of the session at college.

I found it quite difficult at first adding colour to the UIs I had created in Illustrator, which I had now opened in Photoshop, because I wasn't really too sure what colours I would use, as I didn't really plan the colours in my design because I didn't really want to revolve my designs around colour, and wanted to think about them at this later stage in the project, so I had to experiment at first with different colour schemes, and it took me a while to find a colour scheme that I was happy with that I could apply to all my UIs.

After trying a few colour schemes and finding one I was happy with, an idea was suggested to me to improve my UI designs by applying textures to them, but keeping the colours the same, and this is where I learned a valuable skill in Photoshop known as the Burn Tool, which helped me to create midtones and shadows in my textured UIs, which help make my UIs look a lot more realistic and 3D, even though it would still be a 2D image. I kept on working hard to try and perfect my designs, while adding textures to all my different UIs, and trying out other colours that might work better together, and I felt really pleased with the final outcome of this project, and was nowhere near as bad as I first thought it would be, as it allowed me to be creative, while learning new skills that will help me to hopefully produce better work in the future.