We had quite a few false starts during the initial brainstorming phase, creating storyboards and then scrapping them (Conceptualising Narrative Blog Entry). Our problem mainly stemmed from trying to create an interactive storyboard without first creating a model of non-linear narrative that accurately reflected the legend of the spectre. Therefore I think our the group first project milestone was creating our circular model of narrative.

Creation of interactive storyboard
Our next project milestone was developing our "murder mystery" interactive game idea and developing our interactive storyboard around this. Unfortunately I don't believe that our interactive storyboard worked as intended as we deviated from the circularity that we originally were focusing on in order to create a game that would work in a real world situation (the circular part f the game would men the player dies every time he/she plays). Nevertheless in terms of milestones in the development of this product this was very important.



(Conceptualising Narrative Blog Entry Part 2)
Paper Prototyping
(Paper Prototyping Blog Entry)
Paper Prototyping was the next major project milestone. This assured us that players understood our game, the majority understood the story and feedback in general seemed pretty good. It also pointed out some usability issue that were easy to implement in the final product.
Product Development
Our next milestone was establishing how would we develop the product, capture the action on digital video and work out who would do what. Using puppets and composting the background was a compromise on not being able to use stop motion animation because of the trouble sourcing props. This was a group decision but I was a little disappointed as I was very keen on trying out stop motion animation and spent a lot of time researching methods and downloading framegrabbers.
Developing the actual product with flash was a no brainer really, the other alternative was using html and javascript and this would have caused far more work and the end result would be no different at best.
Roles in the group established... but these were not strictly stuck too, with being such a small group we pretty much had to help each other out with everything. This did give a wide exposure to a lot of different areas of production though ad despite this mixing of roles it was useful to have leads on all major areas of production.
Film & Sound Editing
(Filming & Editing Strategy Blog Entry)
Filming the puppets in front of the green screen (green card) was relative straight fwd, not a huge amount of puppetering skill was needed, the only thing that caused a slight problem was keeping the puppets in the middle of the screen and making sure no hands were seen. Recording sound was very straightforward, we just used a dictophone accessory for an ipod. In hindsight though it would have been beneficial to use a better quality recording device as our sound quality in our final product was poor.
In terms of composting the background of the video's I was not sure how well the imovie plugin would work, but it was effective enough for our prototype, with just a small amount of distortion when the puppets move very quickly. We used audacity to balance out the sound levels of the dialogue and then inserted this into the main timeline in imovie.
We now had a set of video's all that was needed was the flash development.
Compression
Compression was completed in imovie. This was very successful in terms of size visual quality but we had some issues surrounding sound quality. Results can be seen here: Video Compression Blog Entry
Prototyped Developed - time to test
After flash development (Scripting Efficiency Blog Entry)we tested our prototype. This test highlighted some big flaws in our design and was generally not very well received (Technical Testing Blog Entry)
Reflection
For me one of the most the most important project milestones was reflecting back on the project and the product we made after the testing was done and I was writing up my reports. I think by deviating from our original intention of basing our product around our non-linear model of circularity, our product was ultimately a failure in the sense that it did not fit what the brief asked and also it did not do what we intended which was help the player learn about the the legend of the spectre.