Guidelines and Assessment Rubric

The project documentation has two purposes. The first is functional, and the goal here is to provide enough information about your project that another developer or team of developers could easily come in and make revisions or extensions (many of you discuss in the scope section of your work plan more features and/or content than you intent to implement). The second purpose of your project documentation is to serve as a portfolio piece when you go out and look for jobs. Following are some strong suggestions of things that will be good to have in your project documentation:

The remaining sections are a little more technical. This portion can be more of a "living" document if you choose, relying on good comments embedded within your code rather than a separate explanation of what your code does (although in both cases you will need a still need a broad overview separate from your .fla file of what is going on). Make the assumption that your end reader is familiar with Flash and knows a little bit about ActionScript, but do not make the assumption that they are familiar with your code. Some good things to include here:

Other thoughts:

Project Documentation Front End - As you have seen with the exemplars, you will be responsible for creating a simple web page (named index.html) that allows other class members (as well as other interested parties) to take a look at your hard work. This front end should consist of the following parts:

Final Project - These are the development files for your final project along with the exported .swf (or .swfs). Most of what I want is described below in the rubric. I will say that although you won't lose points for using scenes as a way to break up your file this does cause performance problems. The preferred method is to use movie clips as opposed to scenes.

Assessment Rubrics

Your final project documentation will be graded according to the following criteria:

Criteria Points
Is your project documentation complete (would someone be able to recreate the structure of your project looking only at the final .swf and your documentation�more importantly, would they be able to easily find what they were looking for if they were forced to come in and make changes?) Does it contain all of the relevant portions as outlined above? 30 points
Is your project documentation accurate? 25 points
Is your project documentation professional (free of typographical and grammatical errors)? 25 points
Does your project documentation contain a functional front-end as described above? 20 points
Total 100 points

Your final project will be graded according to the following criteria:

Criteria Points
Do you use a consistent naming convention for layers, symbols, and pseudo-symbols? Do all of your layers have a meaningful name? (e.g. "layer 1" is not an option) 10 points
Is your project easy to change and update?
  • you should have only the number of instances you absolutely need for each symbol or element of the project.
  • you should use consistent tab stops for your code- don't be shy about using the autoformat button in the actions window.
  • Finally, you should not have any "magic numbers." For the purposes of this class, a magic number is defined as a value in ActionScript that is used in more than one piece of code, but not updatable in one place. If you find yourself typing out a number in more than one location, create a variable and grab the value from the variable instead.
50 points
Do you have a well organized timeline (related layers are near each other, elements are where they are promised). 30 points
Is your project free of all syntax errors, and major logic errors (operating in ways that are unexpected)? 10 points
Total 100 points