Luci Laffitte – Project 3- Adventure Generator
Inspiration-
Early on I had the idea of creating an adventure generator. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, I knew I wanted to create outdoor adventures to cool new places. Upon talking with my classmates I was reminded of the ‘old school’ text adventures. I was intrigued by the mystery of the interactions in these games and ended up playing quite a bit as “research”. I decided to pursue a modern twist on these games by incorporating location awareness through using an iphone and leading players on a physical adventure in addition to a fantastical & fictional one.
Method
I used a free app called “GPS Mail” as an “interface” for the game play. Ultimately I would have loved to create my own app, but I have never used xcode and it would have been impossible in the project scope. GPS Mail however let me send gps data from the iphone to an email address. I was also able to utilize a text entry field usually used for naming locations as an entry point for player actions/chooses.
I read the “emails” in processing using code based on an example by shiffman. *Shout out to Blase and Billy for helping me to figure out how to do this*
In my first real encounter with strings, I searched the emails for latitude/longtiude data and checked if a player enter an action or choice. This step proved to be more difficult that I would have imagined.
Once those functions were running, it was easy to send a response back to the phone through and email to the phone number.
The Story
Writing the story also proved to be a time consuming part of the process because of the many avenues and steps I wanted to include. Here is where I met a hurdle, because the GPS data did not function as accurately as I had hoped and I could not define areas as close as I wanted. (The results ranges in 16-213ft accuracy… yikes!)
I decided that I wanted players to adventure from the cfa steps to the amazon room at Phipps Conservatory. I rode around on my bike taking gps readings from my phone and recording them for later use.
In the end, I was unable to write and code the entire story (getting 2/3rds of the way through took VERY LONG) but I am proud that I was able to get it working as I had.
Reflections
Going forward I would love to finish the story and wrap the idea up in its own beautiful app bundle. Because of the hacking with GPS Mail the user experience is far from ultimate and I would enjoy working on this further to make it into a full functioning adventure app!
UPDATED PRESENTATION with coding documentation updates:
http://issuu.com/lucilaffitte/docs/updated_presentation/1
————————–
This looks like a lot of fun.
I’m confused about the generative aspect of this…is a (mostly) unique story generated for each person playing?
very impressive attempt to learn and combine all of these tools
Very clever workaround for the interaction to avoid having to learn Objective-C and iOS programming. There were clearly a lot of technical hurdles to overcome (POP3, GPS location, iOS development), but I’m not clear on what the generative aspect of the game is. Even if you spent your time grokking POP3, I would have liked to hear an explanation of how you intended to generate the story: in what ways could it vary, how is that variation generated, etc.
really liked the typography used and over theme color palette.
Very nicely presented. +1 I feel there is a lot to explore with the idea.
It’s a very typical situation — where one spends almost all one’s time getting the technology working, and then not enough time for the art. You should go back into it and finish it!!!!!
++1 if you did have more time, it might be interesting to do almost a choose your own adventure sort of path. I don’t think it matters if you prewrite out all the text before hand.
————————-
Phippsss. Nice ribbons. Nice coffee. I think your presentation was really crucial in conveying what your project is about , so it’s good it is nicely designed! +1, the walkthrough of the story looks great
nice presentation.
I agree, gorgeous presentation design style… worth paying attention, everyone,
^^ISSUU is my FAV + also sweet slide design
A couple of coleagues and I (zack) think your project is the next killer app. You and I already talked about the geo-caching crowd. Strings totally suck at first, I found. If you need user testing,
I’m totally in: zjacobso@andrew.cmu.edu.
–
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.
Yuk yuk
Not sure what was actually coded, at this point. But plenty of good info on your research.
I concur — what was the actual code that was written in Processing, what did it do, and what was the relation to the phone activities?
Still, I’d love to see a fully-implemented version of this as a final project! I lurve me some adventures.
Great research into things you didn’t know before; great use of the skills you have; great presentation; and great that you acknowledged the help of your colleagues.
Sounds like a lot of learning experience through this project.
I like adventures/want to go on one. +1
it’s good to see your thought process step by step.
I want one. One What? This is a really interesting way to communicate urban narratives, and encourage unrbanite interaction, through an acessible medium (an app) — It reminds me a bit of the city-wide pac-man games. It would be great if you build this as a framework for other people to submit their own adventures for a city, and build a whole database of stories/explorations.
Nice presentation. Location-based gaming is a big field, it would be nice to see some examples. Where’s the generative component? (the adventure is generative, every choice you make determines a new path/part of the narrative)<--that seems more like regular interactive than generative << Yeah I don't wanna be a stickler for project requirements: who cares. But still it's hard to see how this fits in technically with everything else we've seen today. I'd like to see the adventure be dynamically generated in some way, or some more element of randomness here. i was confused if the adventure was generated by some algorithm? If not: it should be. ^^Generating stories algorithmically is really difficult, because of the structure requirements. ------------------------- Yay! Zork game. Looking forward to see what you have done. Great slides..... ** Yeah! Really novel gaming concept! There's elements of procedural narrative, augmented reality, and collaborative storytelling, so I can see why it's not quite 100% polished yet. It's a great start! Also, your slides and pictures are pretty. great presentation! ** Yeah! I love the illustration of your game through photography. This was a very ambitous concept. I think it has a lot of potential. Great start. *Yes! -------------------------