The first project that I drew inspiration from was Monument Valley created by Ustwo games using Unity software. This indie puzzle game allows the user to walk princess Ida through multiple pathways including optical illusions and objects in order to clear each stage. I really admire this game not only because it’s fun and calming, but also because of its aesthetics. The use of simple color and primitive shapes come together to create the intricate and complex landscape designs. I wanted to incorporate the idea of going through a pathway and make use of similar aesthetics that Monument Valley uses.
Some of the different landscape backgrounds for different stages in Monument Valley.
The other project I drew inspiration from was Hyper Light Drifter which is a 2d role playing game developed by Abylight Studios. The player controls the Drifter and goes through the different stories collecting items on the way and fights monsters. Our project wants to mimic the 2D pixel drawing style and how the character is able to interact with the environment.
Screen capture of one of the landscapes in Hyper Light Drifter.
For my final project, I would like to create a particle effect animations using sprite textures that react to green color pixels in a live capture device. (i.e. webcam) Anything that is green from the webcam screen will be covered with smoke particles. This work is based on daily basis of environmental concern of air pollution that is slowly becoming more vicious, affecting across the world. I want to convey a message, or give full conscious, to the user what happens when there is no green in what you see (from the screen), but full of smoke that can be signified as smog or just the fall of climate change. If smoke effect animations doesn’t work using sprite textures and particles with live webcam, I will try to replace it with some other animation content.
before and after : Using live capture camera input and particle sprite animations replacing the greens..(trees, green plant..or green screens)
I was very interested and inspired by these projects because it requires user input and is based of the direction where the player wants to go the determines where the piece/interactive movement goes. In the first project it is based of a movement that rises and blocks of the fishes from the users character, in this case its the balloon hand. An interactive game called rise and fall created by Theodore Watson and Emily Gobeille. the second project is a bit similar in the sense that the pixels rise and it changes every time. And deletes the older line of pixels on the screen. Also another difference is that it doesn’t really have a shown user tool, but it is modified by time. This also helps with what I want for my final project because I want to make the bricks fall and change as they fall and create a new line. This second interaction piece is called I really enjoyed this project because it was a nice element of surprise the Edge Of Chaos.
When looking for projects that inspired me for my final project I came across a collection of projects called interactive haikus. This is a collection of very short interactive pieces. They are inspired by the short and concise mastering of haikus. This collection is curated by William Uricchio a professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and MIT game lab.
All 12 of the videos are really simple but fun and exciting. I want my final project to be a simple and playful. These projects also follow a loose narrative through the imagery and sound.
One haikus I really liked was Cat’s Cradle by Thibaut Duverneix, David Drury, Jean-Maxime Couillard and Stephane Poirier. It is a interactive constellation builder combined with a interactive musical instrument. I like how the user gets to control what is happening and create their own music/experience. It is also very intuitive and simple. The use of sound is also really effective here.
Cat’s Cradle interactive haiku
scene from seasonal stroller
The other project that I was inspired by was called The Seasonal Stroller by Theo Le De Fuentes and Illustrated by Barbra Govin. This project simulates walking on a path and going on a little journey. Again, I love how simple and peaceful this project is. The is more of a narrative used in this piece. This project also has little hidden surprises throughout, which is something I want to incorporate in mine.
It is obvious that out of the two inspirational
precursors, Galaga developed by Namco is the first precedent. Because both the narrative
and the interface of my game largely comes from the original Galaga, I would
like to capture that reminiscence when I first encountered this game as a little
boy back in 90s.
Galaga by Namco, 1981
Another precedent is Justdance by Ubisoft. Released exclusively for Wii, this game uses the camera sensor to detect player’s dance move. Although my game doesn’t require player to dance, because I will be using interactive camera to affect the gameplay, l think this will be a nice inspiration. As I mentioned in my proposal, the speed of falling space debris will be buffered by the player captured in camera triggered by its pixel brightness.
For my final project, I’ll be making a game that is inspired by the games Pacman and Slither.io. The goal of this game will be to drag the character around the screen to ‘eat’ all the items that are spread throughout the maze. However, the maze consists of walls that the character shouldn’t touch, or else, the game will be over. The maze walls will have dead ends that will make it harder for the user to accomplish the game. The tricky part of this game is that the character will move where the mouse moves, which is hard to control to prevent the character from touching the complex walls. My overall idea is to code so that when the character moves over and through each item, the item will disappear and the scoreboard will increase by one. When the character touches the wall, the phrase “Game Over” will come out. Although I don’t know what the items around the maze will look like, as a person who loves sweets, I was thinking of creating colorful desserts like donuts for the character to eat.
Screenshot of PacmanScreenshot of Slither.ioDrawing of Proposed Project
While I can’t exactly articulate every detail of what I want to do exactly right now. I am planning on doing something illustrates the problems with E-waste (electronic waste) and planned obsolescence. I think it will be an motion-infographic that is kinda similar to the stuff on this website: http://www.distancetomars.com/. Here it illustrates the distances between the Earth and Mars using time and speed. I want to show how “easy” it is for us to just throw away an old computer when so many resources and labor went into making it. This will probably done with interactive graphical elements and storytelling. As far as the statistic side of things, I know that 300,000,000 computers are produced every year but only a small percentage are recycled. It takes 530 pounds of fossil fuels, 48 pounds of chemicals, and 1.5 tons of water to manufacture a single computer.
As a back-up, I will likely do a game with custom sprite animations. It would probably have an 8-bit aesthetic with simple controls and objectives.
The screen would slowly scroll down with animated p5 graphic elements doing the storytelling.
My partner and I were inspired by two specific generative artworks for our project. The first being a project on “codepen” by Sara B. This project works to create an interactive map in which the user can click through different aspects of the map and view different areas. Though there is not as much interaction/information as we would like to provide in our final project, there is a quality to the visuals of the map as well as the concept of creating an interactive map from code to view certain details of the map.
The second generative project was created for a hotel in NYC, Sister City. Created by Microsoft and the musician Julianna Barwick, they were able to create a project which takes from what is happening outside in the sky and reflects it in a music/composition form. So, for example. when clouds pass by as certain sound in the composition is generated, and changes based of things such as the size and color of the clouds. This inspired my partner and I through looking at cities in terms of represented as sounds, rather than the usual representations of pictures, words, and feelings.
As an artist, I love working with different materials and techniques in one project. Therefore, I am always very interested in interactive 3D artworks. One artist that caught my attention was Scott Snibbe, an interactive artist who produces art with diverse media including mobile devices, digital projections, and electromechanical sculpture. Scott strives to bring meaning and joy to people’s lives. In his interactive work, he often portrays the interdependence of beings with their environments and each other through bodily interactions. Although it is an older project, His interactive project Boundary Functions caught my attention because it is something that I want to reflect in my final project with Minji Kim Kim. Boundary Functions is a set of lines projected from overhead onto the floor, dividing people in the gallery from one another. It interacts with the amount of people present on the floor. Though my project will not be dependent on the amount of people but will be similar to this project in terms of the “person” or my icon interacting with the floor by walking.
Diagram / outline of Boundary Functions
Another artist that I was attracted to was David Bollinger, a generative artist who enjoys tinkering wither various procedural, generative, and algorithm. He creates bunch of different puzzle like images with different textures and execution. My partner and I was inspired by David’s maze/puzzle like games and his usage of color and perspective.
shade by atom
David Bollinger has an album called Crayon Maze and it is a skill building maze and tracing game for toddlers, preschool, kindergarten, and children of all ages. It is basically a learning game for toddlers where they trace an alphabet or a number in a game form. We wanted to do something similar by having a secret message in our maze / puzzle like the secret “Q” in the Crayon maze game.
The two projects that I looked closely into and was inspired to create an idea for my final project was Pacman and Slither.io. Pacman and Slither.io. They are both games that has a goal of ‘absorbing’ items on screen. Pacman is a game where the ‘Pacman’ walks around the maze to eat all the items given. However, there is an ‘enemy’ that the Pacman has to get away from and make sure not to touch. Slither.io is a game where the user starts off controlling a small worm and has to ‘absorb’ or ‘eat’ smaller worms from the head, which makes the user’s worm get bigger in size. If the user’s worm gets eaten by a bigger worm, the game ends. Pacman is a very traditional game that was created decades ago but is still famous today. I admire how long the game has been famous and played by users for years. I feel like the goal of this game is simple for people of all ages to understand and easily play, which I think is one of the main reasons why the Pacman is still famous today. Slither.io is also a famous game, which I saw my friends play many times before. I admire this work because of its simplicity of the game’s goal, but complex visuals that makes the users challenge every time they play the game. Slither.io and Pacman are very similar, however, Slither.io is comparably created more recently than the Pacman. The difference between Pacman and Slither.io is that Pacman is played in the setting of a maze, where Slither.io is not. Thus, another difference is that the character of Slither.io increases in size every time the character eats an item, which is not the case with Pacman.
Pacman by Toru Iwatani, 1980Slither.io by Steven Howse, 2016
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