Category: Projects

Arialy & Dorsek – BarcodeProject

 

Ever thought hangman is too easy? The strategy of calling out common letters first– a vowel, s, or t, is predictable. But what if you couldn’t guess any letter? What if you could only guess… letters you scanned with a bar code reader?

Our project is  barcode hangman– you can only guess the letters that you scan! Play against the computer or friend and see whether or not luck is in your favor, or if you can find enough barcodes to scan to get to your desired letters. For additional incentive, the words will form a barcode pun after ever round.

tli-FinalProposal

I plan to further develop my DDR-inspired drawing game for the final project. In particular, I hope to clean up the prototype’s mechanics and incorporate a Photoshop-like interface for creating playable custom “step-charts”. If I have time, I also hope to prototype additional ideas that I have planned, such as paint fill combos, curved lines, or a polar coordinate system. At the exhibition, I will display the game and allow visitors to create their own “step-charts” or play others’.

Part of my proposed final project involves cleaning up my prototype. This can be broken down into 1) exploring better line renderer options, 2) discretizing the drawing to a grid in to promote usability and playability, and 3) revamping the internal representations and structures to better promote custom levels. A stretch goal is improving the GUI visuals.

The core of my final project will be the level creation tool. This tool will directly reference popular image editors such as Photoshop. The minimal implementation for this would simply be drawing lines between points on the grid and transforming these lines to a “step-chart” for the game. However, I hope to include additional functionality such as a draw speed parameter that determines the minimum length of a line that can be drawn in the tool. Another nice feature would be viewing the game sequence on the side, either as a playback or as a snapshot if the user traces the line with their cursor. The inclusion of this level creator also necessitates creating a navigable menu, preserving created levels, and supplying an interface to select levels.

Lastly, as a far stretch goal, I hope to explore some mechanics I have in mind. The most developed of these would be a paint fill combo mechanic. If the player successfully follows a sequence of colored arrows, the enclosed shape formed by the line drawn by those arrows will be filled with the color of the arrows. Another possibility is creating a polar coordinate game mode.

Here are some sketches:

Jackalope-FinalProposal

Change of plans. Trying to make custom shader code for Unreal has proven a mild nightmare. I’ll keep working on that slowly but my final project will just be fixing up my drawing assignment. I’d like to make the comparison algorithm less bad and maybe add a clickable UI instead of all keyboard presses and also fix whatever bug is making it crash any mac computer I run it on.

For my final project I’d like to work on a project I’ve been doing as an Independent Study. I’m implementing the paper, “Art Directed Watercolor Stylizations of 3D Animations in Real-time”. Currently only a Maya implementation exists, so I’ve been working to make and release code so that people can use the watercolor style on their games. I’ve mostly completed a C++ implementation, and I’d like to make an implementation for Unreal Engine as my final project for this class (I got permission from my advisor, Jim McCann already). I’m also in the process of documenting my project so far and making a poster for Meeting of the Minds.

Jackalope-Project4Feedback

From my critique papers it seems people liked my project which was nice and pleasantly surprising. I got a lot of comments about the humor and specificity of it, and also lots of discussion on playing specific roles in relationships/conversation. I feel like this critique format isn’t great though because it feels like so much of the paper form thing is just describing the project, and without specific prompting for criticism I didn’t really get much of it or suggestions for changes.

tli/jackalope-BarcodeProject

Jackalope and I played Pokemon Mystery Dungeon with a barcode controller we made from printed barcode text taped sloppily to a piece of paper and some human-unusable key bindings to a DS emulator.

This setup is with many, many disadvantages. Any game that requires sustained key holding to be playable is out. Any game with any timing requirement is out. Games with multiple simultaneous button presses are out, unless we create barcodes for every such button combination. Games that are just plain long and tedious by themselves are also out. And quite frankly, the barcode reader we use is terrible and has a success rate of about 50%.

On the other hand, this setup made diagonal movement much easier since we created distinct barcodes for diagonal input. This was particularly noteworthy in Mystery Dungeon, where diagonal movement is strategically noteworthy in contrast to the mediocre abilities of the DS to detect simultaneous button presses. Complicated button sequences could also be simplified by printing longer barcodes.

tli-telematic reflection

The first thing I learned is that many of my classmates have terrible handwriting.

Kidding. More seriously, the feedback framed my vandalism cairn in a way I hadn’t expected while I was implementing it at 3AM right before the deadline. For one, many people referred to it as a game even though I hadn’t fully intended for it to be a game. People also emphasized the collaborative aspect much more than I had actually thought about during implementation. I also received useful execution feedback, such as technical things to fix, usability improvements, and further exploration of this idea.

barcode – conye, joshua kerry, takos

Scan your id to get your alternate identity!

This project was made using p5.js, the randomuser API and a barcode scanner. We envision this project as a way for people to treat their state issued ids as a portal to an alternate, digital self!

We also imagined that, because each id is mapped to one and only one other alternate self, the user might have to take care of this alternate self by scanning other items, and if they fail to take care of it properly, the alternate self will die. Furthermore, this self cannot be brought back to life because most people only have one state-issued id.

telematics – crit response conye

From reading the responses, a lot of people mentioned “nostalgia” and the blending/bridging of digital and physical, and the concept of the internet as a physical space. A lot of people mentioned that it “retrieves” postcards and “obsolesces” sending digital messages. I really liked receiving feedback in this manner, because it allowed me to get a good feel of if I was communicating my idea effectively and how they interpreted my concept. I think that based on the responses, they understood my idea well enough. However, the next time I present my idea, I would like to focus more on my personal motivations for making this project (feeling disconnected from my mother, who I like sending postcards to but rarely have the chance to) because only one person picked up on that part during the feedback. I’m really grateful to everyone for taking the time to write down so much feedback!

Here are a subset of the responses that I thought were interesting:

“It’s nostalgic and tangible — it both embraces the internet and brings back a more personal mode of communication” -airaly

“a wonderful idea and successfully mocked up! The UI will be very important and will determine if people use this in reality.” -arialy

“We gather at night around a campfire and tell stories of our digital trends” -ulbrik

“nostalgia for physical interaction” -ulbrik

“to connect digital people with physical tokens.” – ulbrik

“intended audience: the digital native (likely old enough to appreciate the nostalgia of postcards)” – lumar

“goal: share the joy of an internet location… there’s something so innately wonderful about giving something special, that they very act of giving is a gift” – lumar

“We live on [the internet], so why not share your travels?” – lumar

this project shifts the collective towards thinking more of how the digital and physical might blend.” – lumar

“it retrieves a more personal way of sharing. Retrieving postcards, where the message has to be far more considered.” – lumar

“To connect people, show people that you’re thinking of them in a day and age where we spend so much of our time indoors and online.” – dechoes

“This makes ‘journeying’ and exploring the web feel like traveling the world. You can send postcards from your web ‘destinations.’ Very joyful.” -jaquar

“kind of an exercise in obsolescence but charming” – takos

 

gray – telematic crit reflection

Perhaps the overall thrust of the piece was lost or unapparent when I showed three as-yet disconnected interactional elements, without the unification that would make the overall experience legible to the initial viewing in crit. Many of the critiques identified that the completed piece would likely be more understandable once all of its elements are unified.

The categories in the DAIE sequence are almost more useful for me in reading their collation than perhaps the writer themselves. Simple sections such as Description make apparent if I had communicated the actual content fully, whereas the act of writing those uneditorialized observations might be less of an opportunity for their own syntheses.

Sometimes certain fields were left blank, as if those were sacrificially difficult to complete amidst the conversation and the time constraint.

Some of the comments questioned if the piece was more an instrument to create melodies or a tool for exploring a prewritten melody. I built it for both, though I think that the method of granular synth allows a prewritten melody to be played as an “instrument”, as if the spatial structure and arrangement of the available notes afford the same ability of create melodies, even though their spatial pattern isn’t chromatic.

I received some good feedback that the sort of discrete structure-per-note situation with pianos etc might easily apply to this piece with multiple separate volumes with the full continuous mapping of each granulator, but each volume being discrete.