Category: SectionC

In regards to my Final Project, I have found two inspirations for the program I would like to make. I have decided I want to try my hand at creating an “avoid ’em-up videogame similar to the indie game Puss (link) in which a cat avatar follows the mouse as you attempt to avoid colliding into the walls of the mazes you are navigating. Puss also has very psychedelic style and colors, part of which I would also be interested in experimenting with in order to make the game more visually complex.

The second inspiration I have is a throwback to our first assignment with Mondrian. For this project though, I am more interested in something like Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie-Woogie

I like the implied movement and chaos created by the roadways of yellow and the larger interrupting squares. I feel like this aesthetic and sensibility for design could work well for the creation of a visually interesting and distorted puzzle game.

Scott Snibbe is a designer in interactive art, augmented reality, gesture – based interfaces, and digital video. His work has been acquired by multiple known companies like Facebook and New York MoMA. Snibbe started his career as an early developer for After Effects which was also acquired by Adobe. Two of his projects that I believe relate to my final project are two of his app designs; these are: Eyegroove and Bjork: Biophilia.

Eyegroove is an app that allows fans to create music videos and share them as a social network (very similar to tik tok). You could choose songs and create videos to the songs and then share them. Bjork, on the other hand, is considered the first “app album”. This app explores the relationships between music and natural configurations. Both of these apps let people interact via music as well as change the music or what the app is doing. I like that both of these projects change how people can respond to music, but I think they would be interesting if the user could also make their own music.

The two practices I drew inspiration from for the final project included innovative and dynamic information visualizations from Nand.io studio and Stefanie Posavec. The work of Nand.io studio seeks to capture the experience of driving through data, motion, and light. The forces at work within the movement of the Infiniti Q10 are translated abstractly into the diagrammatic explorations in dynamic data. Speed, heart rate, motion, and fluid dynamic shapes are consolidated into cohesive data sets then used to show the data.

Stefanie Posavec’s project, Phantom Terrains, explores the physicality and the auditory presence of wireless networks through experimentally augmenting wireless networks within soundscapes. Network identifiers, data rates, and encryption modes are moved into sonic parameters, then associated with auditory representations.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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. 

The first game my project was inspired by was a memorization game in which you continuously flip through tiles to find matching ones. This is more of a general game idea that I was inspired by. What I don’t like about this game is how restricted it is, in which you have to match two tiles, and how it has a slower game speed. However, I do like the idea of the flipped tiled interface and memorization aspect.

Tiles2 is an Iphone game developed by Andrew Abosh in 2018. The premise of the game is that you have three seconds to memorize a sequence of tiles, and you have to select those tiles in chronological order. I like the fast paced atmosphere of the game, but don’t like the restrictive nature of the numbered tiles, and how the game is immediately over once you select an incorrect tile.

For this looking outwards, I found two projects that relate to webcam art or are interactive program that overlay over a photo.

The first project I found is called Webcam Toy, a website that takes selfies using a variety of photo filters that react to the figure in the frame. Webcam Toy is developed by Paul Neave, a British based programmer and designer who has been designing for over 20 years and focuses on making playful software that incorporates imagination. Webcam Toy has a bunch of filters that warp and mirror the camera at different point of the canvas, and also draws elements on top of the webcam, such as fire or snow that falls on top of the person’s head.

The second project I found is a website called BeFunky, which takes a photo as an input, and has a number of options for effects and filters that can be applied to the image. Some of these filters involve detecting different color gradients in the image and recoloring them. This project was developed by the BeFunky team that is a group of software developers who were motivated to create a tool that lets anyone recreate beautiful photographs without having to learn technical software like Adobe Photoshop.