My creature is named Dollar Chaser – by moving the mouse, the user is able to control the position of the creature. In order to emphasize the life-like movement of the creature, the easing function was used to smoothly alter the position of the creature. Further, its eye movements were also set to follow the mouse positions. When the white circles are added, they are added as spring particles to further promote lively movements. Through such interactions between the user and the creature, I intended to build a puppeteer/puppet relationship as if the creature is a representation of the user.
To further explain the intentions behind my work, the number of little circles that also follow the creature increases exponentially when it collides with a yellow dot representative of a coin. All movement stops when any part of the creature or the circles that have become a part of the creature hits the edges of the canvas. At this point, the phrase “too much?” appears on the canvas. Through such interactions, I wanted to play around with the basic notion in the game settings, where coins essentially help you win. You are encouraged to follow the coins much like many parts of the society that is driven by money. My interactions are unlike such basic notions in that you eventually lose when you have consumed too many coins. Moreover, the user is able to resume the game by moving the cursor to the middle and hitting “enter.” When this happens, the color of the creature fades to black and only its red eyes remain to signify that the creature has been overtaken by the ambition of the user. I wanted these interactions to serve as a reminder that money has limitations – and that it cannot be the sole motive of life.
In order to better foster my intentions, I believe that several features could be added. For instance, a coin could disappear when the user hasn’t interacted with it for a certain period of time or the user could remove some branches of the white circles by sharing them with other creatures. In terms of the flow of the movements, having a larger canvas or reducing the sizes of the creatures and the margins between the white circles could help. Lastly, significant improvements could be made to the visual aspects to make the interactions more engaging for the user.
