The hardest part about this assignment by far was trying to move beyond getting the treasure box to open and close. I wanted to incorporate animals into my scene (birds and butterflies) mainly. My goal was to get them to move to different places on the island. I also wanted to add a boat that would glide up to the part of the shore you stood on when you walked to a certain part of the trigger.

This proved to be too ambitious. I didn't even get to the boat as the animals were a never-ending struggle. My one minor bit of success was importing a butterfly, animating it to flutter, and set up a successful sequence of events in PlayMaker so that when you walked up to it, it would fly over to a pot of flowers.

The other animals I imported were a neverending series of problems. I need to learn more about 3-D models, because I could not get the horse I got from the asset store to move. The horse came with all parts separated. And I couldn't get the horse texture to apply to the model (leaving a stationary pink horse-shaped lump out in the yard).

The kitten was even worse. Adding it to the scene completely messed up my character, so that my first person character is badly messed with (stuck and in "earthquake" mode). It's either an advanced setting that came with the 3-D model that I didn't know how to adjust, or I did not connect the states properly. Possibly both.

Either way, I feel like I could get the hang of working with PlayMaker and interactive states with practice. The video tutorials made a lot of sense, and I just need to play around with them more. My scene didn't turn out the way I wanted because I lost way too much time struggling with the same three interactive items that I couldn't get to work rather than adding more simple interactive items into the scene.

If I've learned anything, it's that I can design environments with very little problem, but I badly need some remedial work in 3-D models. I don't understand how they work, and I can't get them to obey my commands.