s3714226 Jenna Zhang Assignment 3

Artist’s statement (solo)

 

CLICK TO SEE THE RECORDING GAME 

My final solo project is a derivative of my pervious project idea of the maze. The difference is that I want to add content to the blank maze, to actually build a world on it and make it more interesting and playful. The setting I create is house where everyone familiar, thus, the audience will more likely to have the sense of participating. The game is about to help Smile find the three keys she lost in the house. The keys are hide under the position of furniture in the house. During the game, you will need to go through every furniture step by step to test whether there is the key. The extra triggered pictures are prepared in the house as well, add more interest to the journey. There is no time restriction in the game because I wanted the viewers to enjoy the slow rhythm of it. It is not a game about competition, it is more life-oriented. This game encourages the audience to slow down in their own lives, pay more attention to observe the beautiful things around them, enjoy the simple happiness on the journey. In the technical aspect, the main skills I’ve been developed is still in the object of ‘jit.world’. The difficulties I met includes put pictures in the ‘jit.world’, trigger the picture and the sound effect at the same time when the object moves to a particular position.

 

Reflective Statement 

In the final project, I spend lots of time and effort with creating the environment of the game. I draw the background of all the room’s position in the illustrator, plug the background into the ‘world’. Then I start drawing all the pictures of furniture with illustrator as well, in the perspective from top to bottom. Each of them, I chose the favourite patterns from internet and create my own furniture because there are no suitable pictures online that I can find. After finish drawing, I wrap the picture on to the ‘jit.gl.gridshape’ in the world, thus, creating an world contain 3D things like bed, flower, sofa and so on. Actually, I make more furniture in the house at the beginning, but delete most of them when I find that they make the speed of computer really slow, in order to make the ball move fluently. The pictures are selected according to the real-life situation. For instance, put the picture of sleeping in the position of sofa. The grey squares that links all the rooms was created with the similar process of my last assignment, the only change is that I enlarged the size of ‘world’ from 53 to 80. The whole background stuffs of this game took me 2 days to finally complete it.

Another difficulty I meet is to trigger the picture when the object moves to a particular position in the world. It is a quite complicate process as well. I wrap the pictures in the ‘jit.gl.gridshape’ and set up two positions of the picture, one on screen and one off screen. Then, I use ‘sel’ object to set up the position where I want to picture to be triggered. Getting the picture shows up by linking the picture’s onscreen position with the ‘sel’ position. Making the picture move off screen are harder to make because it might need to forecast the movement of players. For example, if I make ‘sel2.98-1.02’ as the position to trigger picture shows up, I need to make ‘sel1.98-1.02’, ‘sel3.98-10.2’, ‘sel2.98-0.02’, ‘sel2.98-2.02’ as the position to trigger picture off the screen, and link them all to the position of off screen i’ve set up. Therefore, no matter where the audience’s next step is, the picture will definitely be closed. This is what I think is the right way to do. However, the audience still need to test the position around to figure out the close button during the game because they might go different way with my forecast. I forecast it might become a problem when the audience play the game, that they might cannot close the picture!

Other improvement I made compare to my last assignment is that I add music to my game. I chose a relaxing background music, and add a sound effect to each picture, which make it game much more vivid and interesting. In the presentation mode, I also label all the position of the pictures and keys in the maze, people can use it as a guide to find keys if they needed.

I consider the successful part of my work is that it allows the audience to play for a long time. If they obey the rules, they probably can play it for at least 15 mins, to test all the positions of furniture and go through the maze. Like what I said, the game is more about observing and testing and the feeling of surprising when discover some of the pictures on the way. There are a lot of things I can improve on if I got more time. I want the keys to be three different pictures instead of using just one picture. I’ll make all the boundaries of room, a position to trigger ‘no’ picture, like what I did to the right side of sofa. Thus, the audience will more likely to obey the rule. If there is more time, I will put more possible pictures in the maze for people to play with.

All in all, I’m pretty satisficed with my final project. Although it’s not perfect, it shows what I learned in this semester, from knowing nothing to learning stuff and complete the project. Although this software max is pretty complex to me, I still have lots of fun to play with it, learning a lot of new things.

Artist Statement (Group)

For our group project (Jake, Kebby, Sam, Jenna) we made a game called Shark Attack where the user controls a shark to eat a diver. Navigating past dangerous underwater mines was the only way to the diver. Not only that, the controls were wired to be the opposite direction of what was indicated on the keyboard. There were three main facets to the challenge that we aimed to achieve – the underwater mine maze, the opposite controls, and lastly, a six second countdown timer which triggers the underwater mines once it reaches zero. We programmed the shark to reset at its starting position whenever the countdown timer reaches zero, whenever the shark touches a mine, or whenever the shark touches the diver. We wanted Shark Attack to be thrilling and feel more like something that you’d find in the app store as a simple mobile game, hence we went with a shark/underwater aesthetic. We had to explore ways to implement the mine’s position into a “select” message which would trigger the bang for the reset. Another new feature we tried to implement was to have an on-display countdown timer for users to pace themselves, which added a sense of urgency to the experience.

Like what I mentioned in last two reflections of this semester, I think what I learned from the group project is to communicate and learn stuffs from each other. For example, we just thow out all the ideas that we can think of, and then select the best one from them. Actually, our group project is quite complex to do, but i got inspiration from it too, to trigger picture when arrive a particular point. Jake is amazing, he is so kind and helpful. The good stuff about our group project is that it’s a very interesting game, that has challenges as well. I always didn’t suceess to get to the end point in 6 seconds. I think the game is quite perfect so there is no things need to improve. In conclusion, I really enjoy this semester with meet lots of new friend and kind teacher.

Solo Project:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zH0lII7DcMCQWvvlnwiPMAvC2Vxjs_FP?usp=sharing

Group Project:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1M4d_X4i1O2T28_w5WspXqQq6ueAa8qyf?usp=sharing

Thank you very much!