#dev tip

I think it is time to give the main authoring tool I use some more focus as without it my iPad creation would not be possible without some hardcore programming, which, as I have previously mentioned, is something I no longer want to have to do in order to get the creative ideas out my head and onto an interactive canvas.

Composer, is specifically crafted to author interactive books and provides efficient workflows to do just that. It runs on the iPad so you get an immediate feel for how your creation is taking shape; the same feel that the end user will experience. This is key and has immediate advantages over developing on a desktop and running your app through a simulator.  

Authoring an interactive adventure game book is a very reiterative process and some events and interactions can be quite finicky to finesse, so feedback and speed of realisation is an important workflow requirement and Composer Pro satisfies these challenges very well.

In addition, because of the ease and speed of editing and review, I often find that new ideas that always come to light, just by the act of reviewing some new addition of event script or animation, will be incorporated there and then without a second thought because it is so quick and easy to do... no need to make notes about future changes, I just climb into them straight away. 

(a work in progress page in editing mode in the Composer Pro workbench)

Composer has a very well designed event behaviour system in place that makes it very easy to script behaviours for objects. These action behaviours allow you to do a whole bunch of actions which are triggered by events, for example:-

'If objectX is Shown' then 'Play AnimationY at normal speed' and 'Stop AnimationZ'

'If thisPage DID Appear' then 'Play this audio track' and 'Fade in ObjectY over 5 seconds'

One trigger can have as many actions assigned to it as you desire, so one touch of an object can set off a myriad of resulting actions.

There are trigger events available for most events you can think of like:

Object Interactions: User touch begins, User Touch Ends, Double-Tap Gesture, Pinch-In Gesture, Pinch-Out Gesture, Swipe-Up/Down/Left/Right Gestures, Object Hidden, Object Shown

Page Events: Page Will Appear, Page Did Appear, Page Will Disappear, Page Did Disappear, Portrait Orientation, Upside-Down Orientation, Left/Right Orientation, Face-Up Orientation, Face-Down Orientation, When Shake Ends.

Actions are split basically into classifications of 'Transform' or 'Function' with an additional one which is a 'Wait for X seconds' which you will use all the time (no pun intended).

'Transform' actions basically cover movement of objects by X,Y co-ordinates over time, changing Opacity of objects over time, changing the width and height of an object over time, changing the rotation of an object over time. These actions can be performed with absolute values or relative values, e.g 'Change X Position to 512' or 'Change X Position By -120' 

The movement transforms also have 'easing' properties to assist in the graduation of the movements like: Linear, In/Out Cubic, In/Out Exponential. In/Out Sine, In/Out Elastic, In/Out Bounce, In/Out Back.

'Functions' are many (too many to mention here) but they cover:

Playing and controlling Audio over 16 Channels, muting effects/music/speech

Page Navigation/Linear next and previous to non-linear jumping around with page return tracking,

Animation controls: playing / stopping/ jumping to specific frames / forwards / backwards / speed etc.

Hiding and Showing Objects

Ignoring or Activating touch response on objects

Playing and controlling movies

Suspending/Restoring Physics

(a preview of the work in progress page shown above... you can switch in and out of editing and review at the touch of a button)

Did I just say Physics ??? ... Yes! Composer has a physics engine built in that allows you to define the world gravity for a book and what objects act under the law of physics. You can group objects (max of 8 groups currently) so that you can determine which objects can collide with others and which objects co-exist without collisions.

You can specify object by object whether it is a 'static' or 'dynamic' physics object. You can specify its 'weight' in relation to gravity and other object masses, so you can control which objects push around others and how quickly they will fall. You can specify how slippery or sticky an object is and how bouncy or rigid it is for collision reactions.

Composer Pro has just introduced 'Physics Spring Joints' so you can easily do things like Rag Dolls and suspended objects that are anchored to the canvas but are affected by physics and object collisions and can stretch out of position and return under property control of the object's joints you specify.

As I use Demibooks Composer for my app authoring which runs on the iPad itself, I try as much as possible to use iPad apps for all aspects of the development, so that I have a self contained development environment on the iPad and I only use my MacBook for those apps which I don't have an equivalent for on the Ipad, like Poser 7, DAZ Studio and some music plugins.

After much sampling and try and error, I now have great art apps, music apps and productivity apps now running on the iPad which can do most (but not all) of my development requirements. I will detail the apps I use as I go forward in the various sections.

For design outline and review I use an app called iThoughtsHD which is a really good mind mapping tool. This app is great for overall design and keeping an updated picture of the project as it progresses and it can work as a development checklist too.

From the basic template, I prepared, I update it with specific notes and imagery as the project progresses so that I can use it as an overview to get a picture of how the plot is taking shape and see any weaknesses or disconnect in the adventure paths.

I also use iThoughtsHD to plan out specific adventure paths for mutli-level adventures.

The picture shows an example of my initial mind map template with a few updates to "The Magical Place" adventure.

As I said in an earlier post I decided I wanted to scale what was just an interactive story into an Interactive Adventure Game Book with puzzles and hidden object adventure scenes. So what is an Adventure Game? Wikipedia describes Adventure Games as:

"An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenge.[1] The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media such as literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres."

So that makes sense:)

What is a hidden object game then? Again taking Wikipedia's description:

"A hidden object game (sometimes called hidden picture) is a genre of puzzle video game in which the player must find items from a list that are hidden within a picture.[7]Hidden object games are a popular trend in casual gaming,[8][9]"

So we are on target there too!

Further Wikipedia describes puzzle games as: 

"Puzzle video games are a genre of video games that emphasize puzzle solving. The types of puzzles to be solved can test many problem solving skills including logic, strategy, pattern recognition, sequence solving, and word completion."

Great, so my crazy notion of creating this hybrid type of new media app for the iPad is not so crazy after all and with the right tool quite feasible... so I am on target and motivated, it's now just a matter of getting the right balance and strategies in place to compliment the story.

Well that was the question that haunted me for some time!

I personally come from a development past with a number of programming languages under my belt that I have been exposed to over the years, so coding was indeed an option.

I started my IOS development research and downloaded and played with a number of development platforms including Objective-C even though quite a few had told me I should avoid because it will take too long to get up to speed.

Well, I won't go into too much detail here but I did find that it was taking too much time to be an expert OBJ-C programmer, so I jumped ship and looked for alternatives. After all, my goal was to produce interactive adventure books not so much to become an OBJ-C expert.

Lots of time, frustrations and disappointing experiences later at various levels of development platform I tried, I decided to design and spec out an authoring app and have a software house quote for the development. I was wanting 'speed to market' now as I had wasted too much time going down the evaluation and self-education route. Bang... that blew up in my face too... and it was going to be much too expensive an option.

Feeling slightly despondent... a knight in shining armour came to the rescue... purely by chance I happened on an iPad authoring tool just recently launched which did a lot of what I wanted to accomplish in my authoring of book apps. Not everything, I might add, for my adventure game book but what it did do, it certainly did well and it was so easy to use... and it was free!

The name of this product is Composer by Demibooks. I downloaded it, played around with it and did copious small examples to take it through its paces. This also prompted me to contact the developers through their forums and the responses were refreshingly quick and professional. All in all an impressive bunch. So that's the product I decided to run with.... Update August 2012 ---> and now I am using Composer Pro beta and the story telling world is looking even brighter! It's not perfect for the adventure game book apps I ideally want to do but it gets closer all the time, and the developer and management listen and stay in touch with their users which is really refreshing in the app development world.

So where does one start? Obviously one needs to decide what type of story app one is going to develop, the target platform and the target market. 

                                 In my case it was going to be an interactive story book app titled "The Magical Place - Volshebney Les"... strange name?, well yes and no... the story focuses in a wild and remote part of Siberia, so I decided to maintain some of the Russian flavour in the naming of things and characters in the story. Hence "Volshebney Les" which means "The Magical Place" in Russian... horosho... I am not Russian myself but the idea of the story came about when I was very close with a lady from that region, hence the influence and indeed the help in the Russian naming of the characters etc.     

The story was written some time ago as a cute story to amuse a cute person. It then morphed into a fully fledged fairy tale type of story by encouragement from an enthusiastic number of readers that were friends... voila... a story was born... but never published.

So when I decided to venture down the app story development road, "Volshebney Les" was an ideal candidate for the job because it is rich in metaphor and adventures which very much lend themselves to visual and sound narrative story telling.

Now I had an original story and a genre of application vehicle chosen.

The next question was, who would the target market be? From the past experience of a cross spectrum of readers ranging from an English teacher of young children, some young adults and some more seasoned readers who all enjoyed the story, I decided I wanted to make a product that had the widest appeal to consumers. So I settled on the target market being a 'family experience' where the family could share and enjoy the experience together, which in today's world is something that does not happen often enough I think. 

The product would need to appeal to the very young through an emphasis on visual and sound engagement but it would also need to appeal to older persons, including adults (brothers and sisters, mums and dads) and this would also ride on the back of strong visual and sound engagement. However, for the older audience it would need an added flavour which I decided would be, aside from a good engaging story and adventure scenes, some engaging challenges. 

Challenges and puzzles as you would find in adventure type games... and so was born my decision to morph the interactive book into a fully fledged interactive adventure type game book.

The challenges would have to be a mix of what younger consumers would find entertaining, for example, cute objects that require just plain speed and touch interaction with interesting responses, right through to more difficult challenges which require some thought and resolution by reading hints and relating interactions to the delivered hints or finding subtly hidden objects which trigger "helpers" or open gateways.

The visual art and animations have to be more sophisticated than just obvious children's art (respectfully said) and the music and sound elements appealing to this wider audience too... in addition add a mix of challenges to satisfy both audiences!

This was/is the most difficult challenge to me as the developer/author and that is trying to find the right mix between all of these needs of engagement.

I hope I have found the right mix... we will see:)

I will venture more on this aspect in a later post or two.   

The target platform? I would like to target all tablet devices for the widest possible appeal but I decided to start with the Apple iPad as the initial target for publishing and hopefully migrate the product to the other device platforms as the tools present themselves.