Final Project - FlashPlankton
CMPS 161 - Winter '06
Anne Sullivan
Description:
FlashPlankton is a Flash based version of the NintendoDS game Electroplankton. Due to possible copyright issues, graphics, sounds, and names have all been changed to protect the innocent.
I chose to implement two of the levels; Luminaria and Marine Snow.
Luminaria (or as I creatively called it, "arrow plankton") is played on an arrow field with four "plankton", each associated with a different sound and moving at a different velocity. As a plankton reaches an arrow it will emit a noise dependent on where the arrow is and then change direction based on where the arrow is pointing. The arrow directions are interactive. I added functionality to assign different sounds to each of the four plankton as well as choosing between the Chromatic and C Minor scale.
Marine Snow (or "snow plankton") is a field of snow-shaped plankton. When you click on a plankton, it will move towards the location of the last plankton you clicked, and again it will emit a sound dependent on where it was located on the screen. Again on this level, I added the ability to choose between different sounds and the two scales.
Installation and Compilation:
Flash-capable browser and a little time to load.
Basic Algorithm:
As it turns out, the hardest part of this assignment was the music. With some music theory background, it would be possible to make this sound less atonal and discordant. I added two scales, Chromatic and C Minor so that it would be possible to play with various tonalities. Since Flash does not have any sound manipulation tools, each of the sounds was recorded using GarageBand. I created 16 tracks, two per instrument for each scale. Each note is over half a second long with the remainder of the second taken up by silence. This made it much easier to play just the second long clip from each file that I wanted during sound events.
Graphics were either created in Flash, or created in Illustrator then imported to Flash and tweaked heavily. Most of the animation was done procedurally as opposed to scripted since the animations needed to take the interaction into account.
| Command | Action |
| space | reset level |
| left/right up/down |
change direction of all the arrows in "arrow plankton" |
| enter | backs up to the level select screen |
| left mouse | "arrow plankton" - clicking on arrows changes their orientation. After two full rotations they go into "free spin" mode "snow plankton" - clicking on a snow plankton makes it emit a sound and move towards the starting location of the last plankton clicked |
Screenshots:
Performance Considerations:
Due to ease of handing in the project, all the mp3 files are embedded which makes this a much larger file than usual. This causes the load time to be longer than normal and breaks preloaders.
Credit:
The startup sound (orchestra tuning) was created by JackW as an OS startup sound, and if you like it, you can find it here: http://www.jounce.net/~jackw/sos/
Project on the Web:
To play with the current version, you can see it here: FlashPlankton