In my artistic practice, I’m excited by the the concept of discovery through the visualization of the self, through both visual and sonic means. I was very inspired by Golan Levin’s, “Messa di Voce” part 4, where moving bodies detected by computer vision leave dynamic computational “auras” that disperse across the screen.
For my final project, I propose a program that manipulates a particle system with features of the voice. I am thinking about creating a landscape of trees, flowers and animals based generated by a singing to it. Trees and flowers could be generated using an l-system growth pattern that responds to the volume or frequency of input sound.
Or, it could be a bit more abstract and simply contain particles that are displaced and moved based on frequency and volume of the voice. That system could act more like a flock of birds, using encoded Boid behaviors.
For my project I would like to create a music visualizer that takes the lyrics from a song and changes the location and form of the letters based on the audio data from a file. I also think it would be interesting to add interaction between the letters and the mouse to make the program more interactive and interesting for the user. The best format for this, I think, would be a long scrolling line of text that is the lyrics of the song that get altered as the music goes on.
For my project, I wanted to create an interactive game that is minimalistic but fun and somewhat challenging. The user represents an organic shape that follows the mouse and is going to be animated using photos preloaded. It will have a constant waving fluid like motion to look more interesting. There will be geometric shapes falling from the top of the canvas that interact with the user. The two shapes that can win the user points are the circles and squares. To get points from the circles, you (the organic shape) must touch the circle, which causes it to burst. To get points from the squares, the user must press one of four keys which will coordinate with the blob’s color, to allow the blob to eat the square of the same color (i.e. if the user presses “Q” the blob will change to pink, letting it eat the pink squares, but if the blob is pink and it touches a yellow square, the yellow square will just pass through it). Beware of the triangles! Touching the triangle will cause the user to lose a life. There is also a score counter at the bottom right. The higher the user’s score, the faster the shapes will fall from the top of the screen. If the user doesn’t hit a square or a circle, the user does not die, they just lost the opportunity to gain that point.
draft made in illustrator of what the game might potentially look like. The blob starts off white until the user changes its color by hitting a key.
For my final project, I want to create a choose your own adventure game. The idea first came when I was stuck in a rut and could not decide on what to do, so a friend of mine told me that a “choose your own adventure game” would have an interesting ending and would be doable with what I’ve learned from in this class.
Some of the games that immediately came to mind for me are: Undertale, The Stanley Parable, and MUD—but i will just be discussing The Stanley Parable and MUD in this post.
The Stanley Parable is an interactive, fictional PC game designed by Davey Wreden initially, and then designed by both him and Davey Wreden in the official remake. I’ve played choose your own adventure games before, but this was the game that really got me into the genre. I admire not only the interesting and unique story, but its immersing effect on the player that pulls them into a world without using action-packed gameplay; while only being guided by only a narrator, visual elements, and sound. There are numerous endings that creates a replay value since every new decision that is made creates a whole new story. I may be biased since this game bring up a feeling of nostalgia, but I still find it to be one of the best in its genre.
MUD is an online, text-based role-playing game where users interact with the world based on only keywords—no visuals or sound. It is considered to be one of the roots of rpg games and an inspiration for other games in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The game had a preprogrammed game, but it allowed multiple players to interact using online chat, player vs player, and interactive fiction. Players would only be able to interact with one another and with the world by typing in commands and reading/viewing descriptions of the environment around them, objects near them, and the other players in the world. This game was incredibly popular, and goes to show that visuals are not always needed to play an interesting and immersive game.
In the mobile game Tap Tap Fish AbyssRium the player taps on the rock to generate ‘vitality’ points which the player can use to upgrade certain parts of the aquarium and purchase new fish with. Its marketed as a relaxation game but really is meant to be addictive and encourages in-app purchases for upgrades. I really like the style and fish animations in this game, the movements are realistic, so are the fishes designs except they are made to be a cuter than the real fish they are based on. I wish the game was more relaxing. I really admire the atmosphere in Chris Johnson’s digital ecosystems (they are both unsettling and calming) and how he explores the various kinds of ecosystems and how they are all connected by the presence of a cycle. I think Johnson’s piece is good as an art piece but doesn’t hold as strong as a game with replay-ability.
Inspired by many rpg and choose your adventure games that I’ve played throughout the years, I wanted to create one of my own (granted, it’ll be much simpler than the ones I was inspired by).
The story for this project is still up in the air to potentially change, but I want to create an escape horror story. It starts out with your character (possibly a narrator instead) inside a pitch-black building, trying to figure a way out. Most of the endings will be considered “bad endings” with one “neutral ending” and one “true ending”. Instead of focusing on graphics, I thought it would be more tense if the user is placed in a situation where they can’t see where they are, but they can hear the sounds around them. The only thing they can “see” is just the text options that they can choose to allow them to continue along the story.
Choose your adventure idea
The interactive part of the game will be the choices the user makes. I considered randomizing some of the story branches – but i felt it would complicate the story more and potentially confuse the player.
One source or inspiration for our project is the video of Spirited Away in 8 bit game form. In this game, the character is moved through keys and there are various interactions that the character has throughout. She meets other characters that are in the movie and there are different missions that she has to complete in order to go through the next scene. This game is similar to what we want to make because of the interactiveness of the game. Just like this video, we want the user to be able to control the character and get to an end goal by achieving different items or missions, or interacting with other characters. I really admire the visuals and the different interesting interactions that are included in the game that go very well with the theme of the actual movie.
Another source of inspiration for our project is the dinosaur game on Google Chrome when there is no internet connection. For this game, the movement of the dinosaur is similar to what we want the movement of our character in our game to be. This game is similar to the Spirited Away game above in that their concepts are similar where the character is moved by the user and have to avoid obstacles to get to the end goal. However, the dinosaur game and the Spirited Away game are different in that the Spirited Away one has more components to it, as the dinosaur one is just jumping over cacti. We want to combine the interaction that is included in these games to create our game for our final project.
For this project, I will be collaborating with HeeSeo Chun. We will be making an interactive game where you control the character’s movement by pressing keys (something like Super Mario or Cookie Run). We are taking inspiration from this video of Spirited Away in game form.
We want to make this a simple game where you go through the map by jumping or ducking. But in addition to these interactions, we want to have some more aspects of interaction such as: dialogue with other characters, acquiring items, etc. As a visual theme, we want to keep the 8 bit visual but as a conceptual theme, we want to use “The Little Prince”. For example, the little prince will be the main character that the user moves throughout the game, and he will meet the rose, the fox, and other characters as he runs. All of these aspects of the game are temporary for now, according to how possible some aspects are to code with our knowledge of coding.
For my final project I want to make a interactive small pond ecosystem (a koi pond) using p5.play, ((I want to expand on a very rough version of an ecosystem coded for 60-210)). A random amount of each element will appear when the sketch is loaded (the lily pads generate in a cluster and stay in the same position for the duration of the program). When the user clicks food pellets will appear and the larger fish will swim towards them, if they touch the pellet they will “eat” it and if the amount of fish present in the sketch is less than a certain amount a baby fish will appear and slowly grow to a full size fish over time. The little brown fish eat the algae and reproduce. The algae amount affects how green the background is, if a food particle overlaps with the algae it will the food and reproduce.
Bleep Space is an iOS Sequencer Toy and arcade created by Andy Wallace & Dan Friel that uses geometric graphics that produce music and sound. The inspiration for this public installation came when Andy enjoyed playing with his friend’s KORG synthesizer. The game was written on OpenFrameworks and the arcade version of this game is nearly identical to its online PC release counterpart. People can create something that is not only auditorily pleasing but also visually pleasing as well.
Another project is called The Creatures of Prometheus, created by Simon Russell. The piece is an orchestra of animated figures that move, change color, and play music using a MIDI file on the program Houdini, a software made to program and run all the figures. An interesting quote from Russell himself is when he said “Usually I’d hand animate every last detail but this one is essentially generative”. This quote really relates to my proposed project.
Both projects involve sound and visual graphics, however the Bleep Space game is more of a videogame that requires people to interact and play with as The Creatures of Prometheus is a program that automatically takes MIDI music and converts it into animation.
I see both projects very relevant to my proposed project. I proposed to make an animation software that is easy to use yet very generative and unpredictable. I want my project to be just as fun to use like the Bleep Space game and also very artsy, generative, and automated just like The Creatures of Prometheus program.
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