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.
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.
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
The first project I found as a precedent for my final project is a virtual dining experiment by Heston Blumenthal and Marshmallow Laser Feast back in 2016. This event provided visitors with a groundbreaking experience of dining in a virtual reality. The software itself uses tracking technology, and real-time motion capture for a “multisensory, mixed-reality cuisine”.
event poster
The second project is a game I was inspired by for this final project. Cooking Mama is a classic game by Office Create originally released for the Nintendo DS in 2006. It simplifies the cooking process for a variety of menus, which users choose to simulate. The game provides users with a platform to cook using interactions between the touch screen and the stylus. One opportunity the game might’ve overlooked however is the potential to become an educational software. If the game had used accurate recipes and a slightly more complex and realistic process and representation, the game could’ve easily been further developed to be used as practical tools for use in the kitchen. However, the game had its own characteristics because of its inaccurate representations and recipes that made the simplified game more appealing to the general public.
I found the two projects similar in that both provide a digital experience in regards to food. While the first project may be more accurate and realistic, Cooking Mama emulates the experience through the stylus interactions, sound effects, and visual depictions of real food. Even though the first project focuses on the dining experience while the second targets the cooking experience, both programs provide users with a virtual experience with food to simulate the actual act of dining/cooking.
Relevant to my project, which is to visualize the climate change on a world map, I find this visualization of temperature rise from 1880 to 2018 by NASA Global Climate Change very helpful. The idea is very similar in a sense that I am also considering to use color change to show the change.
Another information visualization that shows the global forest loss with Global Forest Watch is similar to my final project.
“With Global Forest Watch, you can see where forest loss is most pervasive, threatening indigenous lands, or reducing biodiversity, so we can act quickly when deforestation happens where it shouldn’t.”
Two projects both used different methods to express the change, and with more brainstorming, it is possible to find another way to express the change happening over time.
Taiko no Tatsujin is a music-related game I found really inspiring for my final project. The main objective of Taiko no Tatsujin games is to hit a simulated Taiko drum following a chosen piece of music, corresponding to notes scrolling from the right. When the screen is scrolling, once the orange circle is landed at the dashed circle at the left side of the screen, if you hit it, at the perfect timing, you are going to get bonus and animation at the bottom is also going to change correspondently. I really admire this project in that it has a really interesting graphic and depending on the different melody that you are playing, the background animation is also changing correspondently to the music.
neutrino oscillations simulation, Hirosi Ooguri
The scene showing the” rewinding” of the Universe is created using the latest scientific data and it is done by Hirosi Ooguri, a professor at Caltech. This image added some artist expression and its objective is to visualize neutrino oscillations. I really admire this project in that it is visualizing the universe really artistically.
These two projects are really good precedents for me as I am envisioning my final project to be a music-related project, probably piano. When the user pressed certain buttons on the piano, the universe at the background will be changed accordingly based on the music and different music will yield different visualization of the universe.
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