DESIGNING THE INTERFACE

We then spent a couple of classes designing the characters in the game, as the kids had *very* specific requirements on what they wanted their characters to look like. We found some blank pieces of paper and color pencils, and the kids got to work. I planned for them to take a photo of all of their artworks and then instant alpha them so that there would be no background when the image sprites were made. Some students had a lot of characters, which look a LOT of lessons to finish. Looking back, this was probably one of the biggest mistakes I made - they had so many characters to draw, which then led to a lot of instant alphaing, which in turn led to spending a lot of time coding and consequently led to some of them unable to finish their game due to time constraints. Although the kids had a lot of fun, I wish I had thought about the timeline and had told them to move on instead of allowing them to draw all of their planned characters.