The home stretch!

Click here for my project.

I haven't made much in the way of programming changes on the project this week because I have been trying out a new way to get the music to work. Per the suggestions of Daisyane Barreto, I have been trying to move the music to timelines rather than loading them into each symbol. I think this is probably the way the music should work. It keeps stuttering in the music from getting all of the tracks off-track. I hope it works because right now, this thing is really chugging along.

In other news, I have to build the graphical elements for the "stage" and searching for all kinds of metaphors, including an actual stage of sorts, but I'm thinking about keeping it very simple. I would love it, honestly, if I could make the site without any directions at all, or maybe have it say, simply "drag." That would be fantastic, and it would certainly adhere to the tenets of John Maeda's Laws of Simplicity (maybe a tad too much!), of which I am a big fan. I won't go into all of them here, but the first two are Reduce and Organize, which is something I need to do in all aspects of my life. Basically, Maeda proposes a continuum between these two concepts:

How simple can you make it? <---> How complex does it have to be?

I don't think my project has to be very complex to be honest. I chose drag and drop functionality because it was very simple and it would make the user feel that interacting with my Flash project was more tangible and satisfying. Dragging something around is a lot better than clicking on it, in my opinion, in terms of immersion, but that could be personal preference. Regardless, I need to make it obvious to the user that they are supposed to drag the object to a certain while keeping my "stage" free of verbal clutter. I really want it to be visually striking.