Category: SectionB

To get inspiration, I looked at the flood map for 2015, and was immediately shown areas of China. I saw Shanghai, and decided to look up landmarks in that area. A great one was the Nanjing Road, a very colorfully lit street. After looking at the Patatap video by Jono Brandel, I decided to do a project changing on a beat. It would start out with a hard coded version of the landmark, then on each beat it would change, showing the water level rising and landmark degrading and losing its beauty.  The lights will all be grey/off, the ground not visible. I may or may not use multiple landmarks. Most likely I will. I want to have these landmarks be from around the world, basically showing how this affects many people and many different types of countries/states/areas. Other places threatened by flooding are Florida, parts of Vietnam, parts of Thailand, parts of Bangladesh, parts of Iraq, etc…

1. I don’t really know anyone in the class so I probably wont be collaborating.

For my project, I wanted to create an interactive game that combined the suggested prompt– climate crisis and my own personal favorite childhood game Pokemon. I will be incorporating multiple elements that I’ve learned throughout the course. The game I will be coding allows players to use the Pokemon character Squirtle to extinguish the fires. As someone from California, I’ve been very concerned with the number of fires that have been occurring and the impact the fires have been having on the air that my family breathes back home. The fires will pop up at a random position on the screen while the player can use Squirtle’s water gun attack to extinguish the fire. The game will also feature a score tracker at the screen of a corner to keep track of the number of fires the player’s Squirtle has extinguished. I will also attempt to include the sound feature as Squirtle extinguishes each fire. For graphics, I will be creating an animated landscape accompanied by sprites of Squirtle online. 

For the final project, I want to challenge myself by learning a p5js function we did not learn about. I want to create an interactive game using speech/voice recognition. I want to create a game like Scream Go Hero where the user has to “scream” to get the avatar to move. A soft voice would make the avatar move. A loud voice would make the avatar jump. The higher the volume, the higher the avatar can jump. The objective of the game will be the same as the avatar has to collect as many objects as it can without falling through the cracks. The actual game doesn’t have much design into it, so I want to create a version where it incorporates a generative landscape and other obstacles.

If I have having trouble getting the speech recognition to work, then I will do a version of flappy bird.

We will be working on an interactive game that will be randomly generated, with a game system similar to Reigns (but simplified). In the game, there will be character cards randomly chosen and presented, asking the player a question or presenting the player a scenario. The player will need to swipe/click right or left for one of the two choices, and the choices will affect one (or more) of the four aspects of the player. In the original game, the four aspects were those of the kingdom, but we want to create a CMU student version, with the four aspects being academics, sanity, finance, and social life. Character cards will be drawn and imported, questions and outcomes will be written and randomly chosen. There will be 9 different endings based on choices. (8 of which are bad endings where the player fails the game, the last ending is when the player successfully graduates CMU)

A sample question can be: [A close architecture friend of yours] “There will be an architecture party tonight, do you wanna come?”

>Yes [result: 10% reduction in academics, 10% gain in social life]

>No [result: 10% gain in academics, 10% reduction in social life]

For the final project, we want to create an information visualization map of the world that represents climate crisis by emphasizing either the rise of temperature around the world due to global warming, or the amount of electricity used around the world. To further elaborate on one of the idea we have proposed, the map could possibly show the amount of light (or even how big the city is) of each places. For instance, places like United States will be much brighter with more use of lights compared to third world countries. In the United States, depending on how many parts we divide it into, bigger cities like New York city or Los Angeles will light up much brighter than Wyoming. Moreover, the world map that displays the gradual increase of temperature on Earth may also be very attractive potential topic. We believe the matter of issue on global warming may be effective in order to visualize information because it is our reality that the Earth’s temperature is constantly increasing.

I will be collaborating with Jenny Lee on the final project, ylee1@andrew.cmu.edu Section C

Jenny will be responsible for coding to design the illustrative aspects of the map and Minjae will be responsible for coding the interactive aspect (of lighting up certain areas, for instance). We will both help each other to create this map art and fairly divide the work together.

I think art is inspiring as it serves as a versatile instrument where artists can communicate their beliefs and ideas to their viewers. Such message may be very personal such as the sentiment of happiness or sorrow or even socially conscious, trying to bring about changes that the artist believes in.
Such socially conscious art projects are valuable as it finds an easy way to communicate messages to the public. Not only is it easier to understand, such projects tend to resonate with the audience if interesting.

As such, I decided to go ahead with Professor Dannenberg’s suggestion to make a project with the theme of global warming. My previous blog posts had two global warming projects with vastly different ways of communicating the message. In my project, I will use both sympathy and entertaining interaction to communicate my message.

In order to clearly depict the how the wrongdoings of human beings are causing climate change, I will reserve one section of the project where the user can add pollution to the atmosphere through the destruction of trees and creation of factories. As the number of factories grow, the sun on the right hand side to grow bigger causing the ice caps to melt until the bears and penguins eventually submerge.

The point of the project is to portray that our own actions can cause global warming and cause the poor animals to die. Through interesting interaction and pity felt during this “game”, I hope that my message will reach its audience.