Best Practices

Building great, interactive iPhone content benefits from planning. Due to the richness of the iPhone native capabilities and the richness of VixML, we recommend the following best practices for developing premier content for the iPhone.

A typical production pipeline goes through the following phases:

1. Ideation
2. Storyboard
3. Visual Asset Creation
4. VixML Development
5. Audio Asset Creation
6. Refinement
7. Compression
8. Submission

As with any production process, developing VixML content doesn't always proceed directly from step to step. We find that we spend a lot of time iterating through the production cycle. Feel free to contact us at any stage of development to review your development progress.

Ideation

Before starting any illustration or development, its helpful to fully document your idea. The documentation should include a brief description of the concept, a detailed outline of the interactivity of the content, a description of the visual style for the content, and an outline of any other info necessary to document the idea. At this stage, you may also wish to define the high level approach for asset creation: Will they be created in 2D or 3D? What tools will be used?, etc.

You can save a lot of time by clearing defining an idea before you start building assets or writing VixML code.

Storyboard

The goal of the storyboard phase is to visually document the idea and provide a framework for asset creation. We generally storyboard our ideas with pen and paper rather than using a computer. This helps us focus on sketching out the idea rather the prematurely jumping into the asset creation phase. One or more good storyboards goes a long way towards getting everyone on the same page and making sure that the ideas has been well thought out. As a result, the asset creation phase generally goes much more quickly.

(rest of article coming soon)

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