Building locks

The original plan was to have a single dial combination lock but when designing episode 23 I decided that there would be five numbers. That meant that the lock need 5 numbers. While I suppose it would be possible to have the dial support 5 numbers, I thought that a more obvious five digit lock would be better.

My first thought then would be some type of keypad. This would be fairly simple to implement. The problem with this is that criminals, even ones working for secret government agencies, are not going to be using high tech locking mechanisms on prisoners. While this is a doable solution, I felt that it was not a good one.

At this point I looked at my briefcase. It had a 3 digit combination lock with each number being on a separate wheel. This would be very simple to design, very easy to implement, would actually be readily available even to criminals, and having a five digit combination was not that far of a stretch.

To build a combo lock, I need five of the number disks, but I only need to create one disk. By making the one disk grey, I can take advantage of tinting to create a five color lock. If I had more time to devote to the creation of the episode I would have created an animation of each of the ten positions that a wheel could be on then simply had two invisible hotspots so that the wheel animation could start when the top or bottom of the wheel was clicked on.

Instead, I opted for a faster development approach. The top and bottom of the lock are made up of a simple arrow button that took only a minute to make. The number is a ten frame movie. I could have even created the wheel faster by using a dynamic text field, but I figured that using the multi-frame approach would allow me to come back and do the animated wheel version of the lock if I had time later..