Author: bumble_b

bumble_b-FinalDocumentation

For the final open studio project of the semester, I worked on catching up on all the assignments I missed due to my big junior year design assignment earlier in the semester. Below is a list of all the assignments I completed with links to view them. You can also view the posts I made on phases 1 2 3 4 of the final project here.

  1. Making a Timer: Fuse (or Progress Bar)
  2. Using Arrays: Living Line
  3. Array + Search: Longest Line Segment
  4. Array of Animating Objects: Ripples
  5. 1D Perlin Noise: Mountains
  6. 2D Perlin Noise: Imaginary Islands
  7. Arrays, Geometry, Interaction: Line Intersections
  8. Recoding “Interruptions” (Molnár, 1968-69)
  9. Generative Landscape Open Processing   |   Blog Post
  10. Monster (Three Rectangles Only)/Monster (Alternate: Anything Goes) Open Processing   |   Blog Post

bumble_b-FinalPhase2

With Golan’s help, I’ve felt inspired to dip into my Persian identity for the creature/monster project and create something meaningful.

I’m a little early in my process, so I don’t have any big ideas jumping out at me quite yet, but I do have some great resources to help me get there.

First, is a project by Iranian artist Morehshin Allahyari called She Who Sees the Unknown. These images (which can be found here) are of a jinn named Huma who has three heads and two tails. The first two are inspiration/contextual images from books and the third is the installation she created.

I actually quite like the look of the book pages that she referenced, with the yellowing pages, the borders, and the text. I like that style a lot and may want to do something with that.

Morehshin has lots of really great examples of creatures from Persian/Islamic legends and mythology, which is really inspiring. There is also a Wikipedia page listing Persian legendary creatures which I’ve been looking at. I’m particularly inspired by a few, like the Bahamut which is a fish that holds up a bull that holds up an angel that holds up the world. It seems to be an Arab legend, not Persian, but I like it nonetheless.

I also really like Paris, who are beautiful, female spirits with wings.

Best for last… my absolute favorite is the Shahmaran, half woman… half SNAKE!!! What??? So cool.

I think I’m also going to ask my parents for their thoughts and see if they can help inspiration strike! The biggest question I have right now is… even if I can recreate one these creatures… how will I make them behave? That’s the important part of this project, of course, so I want to make sure I’m both inspired by how a creature looks/its history and also how it behaves!

bumble_b-FinalPhase3

List of Completed Assignments

  1. Making a Timer: Fuse (or Progress Bar)
  2. Using Arrays: Living Line
  3. Array + Search: Longest Line Segment
  4. Array of Animating Objects: Ripples
  5. 1D Perlin Noise: Mountains
  6. 2D Perlin Noise: Imaginary Islands
  7. Arrays, Geometry, Interaction: Line Intersections
  8. Recoding “Interruptions” (Molnár, 1968-69)
  9. Generative Landscape Open Processing   |   Blog Post

Assignments to be Completed

  1. Monster (Three Rectangles Only)/Monster (Alternate: Anything Goes)

bumble_b-landscape

Open Processing Sketch

A couple of things to note at the start… totally bombed the easiest part of this project… making the canvas a 2:1 ratio. I drew the water and submarine as a square, then remembered it was supposed to be a 2:1 ratio, but the thought of redrawing all of it made me want to die, so I cropped it to a 4:3 ratio which is random but the best I could manage. Sorry 🙁 Second, I managed to do this in like one afternoon, which is pretty evident I’m sure. But, I’m trying to do my best with the time that I’ve got, and I do want to come out of this class knowing I at least gave every project a go.

The original inspiration for this project came from the atmospheric train ride from a past student that we looked at in class. A refresher:

I really liked this idea of a .png image and looking through a hole of some kind into the outside world. My immediate thought was to make the inside of a submarine, but I wasn’t really interested in making underwater creatures. It eventually morphed into a submarine expedition around the world, based on my boyfriend’s father who did just that in his time with the military. When looking at the final product, I’m dissatisfied because I think I accidentally left behind the one idea I found charming to begin with: a hole, a window, something surrounded.

In this sped up gif, you can see that the submarine and waves kind of bob up and down. I orginally had them static and felt like something was super off and weird. Giving them a little life (independent of each other too) definitely helped. You can also see that the sky cycles through day and night. I really like that I did this… it sort of gives this idea of the passage of time, how long this submarine expedition and adventure is really taking.

I can only really draw in a cartoon-ish way, so I also added the faux black outlines to the mountains to match my drawing, which definitely helped make everything more united, but after talking with Golan about trying to broaden my horizons and make less “cutesy” stuff, I wish I gave myself more time to try that. Hopefully I can do that with the creature project!

bumble_b-FinalPhase1

Since I’m so behind on my work, my number one priority for this final project is getting all of that done. This includes:

  1. Deliverables 1B
  2. Deliverables 1C
  3. Deliverables 3C
  4. Deliverables 4

Once I’ve completed those deliverables, if I have any remaining time, I really want to do the following:

  1. Create a website for my SoundCloud clock (and update it, because it’s already starting to decay away with people deleting their songs!)
  2. Refine my Longest Word project, particularly by troll-proofing it and optimizing it for all screen widths and heights

My intention with these two projects is to start building my portfolio, since I’m a rising senior and still don’t have a website to showcase my work! That’s my summer project for myself, so getting a head start on these two things would be helpful.

bumble_b-AugmentedBody

Scotty Dog Simulator

 

I started this project pretty late, so I knew I had to stick with something pretty simple. I had a few ideas about making filters of School of Drama professors and their iconic caricatures, but I don’t really like them and hate the idea of idolizing them. Plus, it wouldn’t really land well with our class who doesn’t know them. I was pretty set on doing a filter, since I had a feeling it’d be simple, so I thought a little longer and landed on our adorable scotty dog mascot, keeping with the Carnegie Mellon theme I originally had!

Since I really want to learn how to make games (and also needed to add some complexity to a very simple idea), I added a little start screen and some bagpipe background music (that ended up stuck in my head for like a whole freaking day).

I also decided to add a bark sound every time the user opened their mouth, which I accomplished by calculating the distance between a point on the top lip and a point on the bottom lip. That’s definitely my favorite part of the project now.

Something I didn’t think about, and therefore did not give myself enough time to implement, was how to scale the filter based on the distance the user is to the screen. Also, if they turn their head, the filter does not rotate with them. When I got the feeling something was wrong, I opened Snapchat and experiemented with their filters, seeing how they scaled and rotated perfectly! That’s definitely where this project has fallen short, and I wish I started earlier to give myself that time.

Here is an early process photo where my scotty dog kind of looked more like a cat than a dog…

 

bumble_b-telematic

Play Longest Word

Look at the code

Longest Word: Try to come up with the longest word you can using the random letters of a 5×5 grid. Compete with your family and friends to see who can get the longest word, and compare your scores on the scoreboard! There’s a new grid of letters to try every new UTC day!

This project was based on a Trivia Murder Party (a Jackbox game) mini-game where you have to find, from a grid of letters, the longest word out of all of your friends. The person with the smallest word dies.

I’m really proud of the random letter grid algorithm I developed, along with the implementation of the hiscore template in the scoreboard, that refresh every brand new day. In the past, I’ve only been able to make games that are fun for a few minutes, then immediately get boring. The fact that this game lives and changes on its own… does something new every day… I’m pretty proud of that!

I’m also happy with the checking system… checking to make sure the user input actually uses letters in the grid then checking to make sure it’s actually an English word.

There are some things I’d like to change, like maybe adding a time limit (similar to Trivia Murder Party’s version) to add a little bit more challenge and discourage cheating. I might also add some code to make it that no word can repeat on the scoreboard (basically, only the first person to have guessed that word can show up). In the above photo, if 10 people said “strengthen,” the whole scoreboard would show that, which would be pretty lame. I think this would also work a lot better as a two-person game with time limits, again to discourage trolls and cheating. Regardless, this was more so a learning experience that I’d at most share with my family and friends. I didn’t really intend this version for global use, as it’s supremely vulnerable to internet jerks.

There were some suggestions from the crit to make this game more complex, though I disagree. Yes, it’s a pretty simple concept, but that’s why I like it (and why I could actually complete it in two weeks).

I am really really proud of this game, and I really want to fix those things I mentioned above, as well as make it responsive to device height (it’s already responsive to width). It just kind of feels like the first thing I’ve made that people would actually want to use! I think this is a project that, though the due date has passed and I’ve already turned it in, I want to continue developing.

Here’s my original sketch, when it was just meant to be a two-person game.

bumble_b-VQGAN+CLIP

I feel really stupid for how long I spent trying to get Colab to work. If I wasn’t making this assignment up a few weeks later, I would’ve just headed over to office hours, but since I’m so late already, I just used Pixray instead.

My prompt was: “friendly elves frolicking in a meadow, strawberry picking with baskets, with a giant rainbow in the sky”

It was fun seeing the photo slowly develop through iterations. Here are some of the first ones:

Compared to the end product, it’s so much different! Anyway, I really love the picture, especially how cute the elves are! I just kind of wish the rainbow was there!