Category: Section E

For our project, Rachel and I are working off of two inspirations. The first is a choose-your-own-adventure game created by a group of five students at MIT that allowed players to create alternate endings to the storyline of the Hunger Games. This is helpful to our process because it uses sound effects and animations that could be relevant to our process. Additionally, it was created by a student team that points towards a supremely beneficial exploration of various features or tactics.

^The original Tetris from 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov

Our other inspiration is rather well-known. One of the first “falling block” games ever created, Tetris has become one of the most distinguishable video games ever created. In an interview for the Guardian, Pajitnov wrote:

“Next I put together the procedures for manipulating the pieces: pick a tile, flip it, rotate it. But the playfield filled up in 20 seconds flat. Also, once you’d filled a line, it was kind of dead, so why keep it on the screen? So I made each full line disappear, which was key. I was a pretty good programmer and it took me about three weeks to get something controllable on screen. I pretended I was debugging my program, but in truth I just couldn’t stop playing it. When other people tried it, they couldn’t, either. It was so abstract – that was its great quality. It appealed to everybody.”

Our stacking game uses slightly different principles, but Tetris paved the way for determining issues of velocity, instance, and randomness, all of which will be extremely relevant to our final project.

Project Name: Carl Makes a Meal (tentative);

Project Partner: Rachel Park (rsp1);

Project Manifesto: “For our project, we are creating a two-part immersive experience that’s part-“choose your own adventure” and part-Pong game. The premise brings back an earlier character Hamza created in the early days of the class, Carl, whose goal is to make a nice, home-cooked meal for his girlfriend Carla. But, it has to be perfect. In a choose-your-own-adventure game, you’ll have the option to check the fridge for ingredients, or travel to a new country to pick some more rare ingredients. There’ll also be information on these pages about these ingredients. We’ll create these pages on Illustrator and use a series of key presses to activate each ones. (see diagram below).

Players will “cook” the meal through a stacking game where they use a plate to catch the ingredients to make the “perfect” meal (see below). Once the stack reaches a certain height, the game ends with an image of the final meal in its finest presentation.

For the final project, I will be creating an interactive game that is similar to both Flappy Bird and the T-Rex game of Google Chrome (the one that shows up when there’s no internet connection)

It is designed to make the user feel competitive and want to play more just like any typical games, but also to make the user feel happy while playing. That is why I decided to make the ‘main character’ of the game to be the dog. This dog will be flying in the air with the landscape passing by in the background. The goal of the game is not to shoot anything or avoid shooting or anything violent, but is to obtain bunch of floating items in the air. When it encounters a hat, the dog will wear the hat, and when it encounters a piece of clothes, the dog will wear it.

I believe that I will be able to create this by using randomly-created-landscape functions and loadImage() commands. Since The dog will be constantly changing its posture, I would need to use the for loop to constantly load different images.

As discussed in my week 12 looking outwards post, works that appeal to me are composed of intricate designs that are extremely decorative and complex. In order to create various detailed structures, I plan to incorporate turtle graphics in my project. This project will work as an extension of my week 11 project, as I would love to explore the concept further.

Both random and systematic factors will be utilised to make an interactive project that allows the audience to create, destroy, or alter the formations of turtles using the mouse or keyboard. I also plan to have an audio that either plays in the background or changes based on the interaction.

I was also very intrigued by Professor Dannenberg’s turtle graphics sketch that was presented during the November 1st lecture, although I do not remember how it was created (I wrote the code down but my sketch does not work because of unknown errors). I recall finding the delicate, thin lines very appealing.

I will also take the suggestions that were provided for the week 11 project into consideration.

• A turtle which responds to the cursor. You could have a turtle that responds to the position of the user’s cursor, for example, fleeing away from it, spiraling around it, etc.
• A turtle which responds to an image on which it is crawling. You could use an image (hidden or otherwise) as the “terrain” on which a turtle is crawling, and the turtle could make decisions about which way to turn based on the color of the pixel underneath it.
• A family of turtles which are following or avoiding each other. With the addition of some noise() or randomness, this can produce very surprising results.
• Using a turtle to draw different kinds of visual forms. Turtle Graphics are particularly well-suited to drawing complex curves, dotted lines, calligraphic curlicues, and other unusual structures. Google around to see what’s possible…
• A big flock of turtles that…?

Ever since I was very little, I always loved telling stories and making animations. The idea of making characters you imagine come to life and have their own life stories and experiences always fascinated me. So, when I was first introduced to the computer during my elementary years, I already self-taught myself the fundamentals of animation and how to publish these animations to YouTube. During the years, I kept on making animations and practicing during my free time, however as I got older and busier, making the animations themselves became a struggle and difficult even for someone who has the passion for it. Because of this, I now search for ways to make animations not only better, but faster to produce through computer programming, rigs, and algorithms.

I propose to make a simple program that allows you to move and save the position of an animated stick-figure rig or shape, move and save a second position, and allow the character to move using those two or as much saved positions as possible. The animation can be played forward or backwards and its frame cycling speed can be adjusted. My proposal sounds both very difficult and simple yet I am excited to give it a try.

For this project, I am planning on collaborating with Maddy Cha (andrew id: mecha, section E) in order to create a story-based game in which the choices a user makes affects the rest of the story. The story/ game will be presented as a series of images with text. Players will be able to choose options/ text prompts by pressing corresponding keys.

The story will revolve around the player’s trip to a grocery store, in which the player can choose to buy items that will help them progress. Each part of the story will have a different character that will respond to different objects that the user decides to purchase.

We will also implement randomness in order to make it so that each user’s experience is a little different. We will randomize the order in which characters may appear in the story as well as different events that may help the player later on.