aram’s blog

I did a comic that consists of three stories crossing to show more than one ending sequence to the audience. The subject was ‘Tony Montana‘ from the movie Scarface, who is becoming almost insane in the particular scene that I chose to use.  Since this isn’t about re-creating or ‘just’ cartooning one of my favorite movies, I decided to tweak the story by grabbing one famous(very!) line - “Say hello to my little friend!” where the story begins.

Intended flow was that the audience to read

1. left vertical story line first, move onto right side one following by
2. the ‘bridge’ strip which consists of two identical ‘pause’s in center, then
3. view the third story.

And each strip should tell you following stories

1. Left vertical line: Tony gets angry (for what happened before) then yells at the cuban mobs (outside of the door), there’s no response but a cat’s moan.
2. The bridge line: An intended ‘pause’ by cloning same cuts of Tony pointing his gun at the door. Finally he hears ‘Hola’ from the cuban mob outside and feels embarrassed by.
3. Right vertical line: Cuban mobs waiting for the right moment to burst in, gathering more crew around the door area. Then they hear loud “Say hello!” from inside and respond saying ‘hola’. The door blasts out by angry Tony’s gunshot, casualties, and there’s Tony looking down them and saying ” I said ‘Hello’(not any other languages?)”.

Feedback from class: I knew that the first one would be ‘why not ‘z’ axis’? which means, this comic lacks of three dimensional aspect. I started off thinking about making comics in 3D form even before brainstorming about the story, however, creating comic itself(in rather conventional way such as drawing and putting it in the square cell box) seemed priority that I should spend more time. And… I ended up respecting all reference comics from online and spending my lifetime to mimic them as I could. I think it was a good practice to understand, or at least experience comic drawing skill.

Besides this, more powerful and unexpected one was that many of class didn’t quite undestand how story goes. And some details such as sweating with darkened face wasn’t comprehensible.

To work continuously in related subject from midterm project - Tree Map, I did several graph visualization on Processing.

First, I attempt to create a simple graph with few nodes. My personal interest of movies has become the content of this graph, either movie title or name of the actor, director are shown in each node. Again, most important thing was not to show a beauty of floating text boxes, but to depict the ‘relationship’ between each word. In this example, people can see how James Cameron and his movies hatch actors who can be related to different movies.

Second images shows a ‘mess’ when dealing with a large number of data, later on these nodes+text combinations will become small sized ellipses.

Before taking a further step to utilize xml data parsing, I attempted pulling up data from my local hard drive. As a result, it shows segments of words in one of my .doc file ( I specified this file to show ‘text’ data into nodes rather than only specifying a folder. That would show a meaningless data.)

Finally, after several polishing on the visual part of the code, it shows following visualization with a kind of ‘halloween’ color scheme. It might look ‘pretty’ in a way, however, I am not fully satisfied with this result which could be meaning ‘all substance but no meaning’. This is, also, the main thing that I learn from this project. Creating data-visualizing isn’t that difficult, especially with all dynamic sources around. However, taking further step in order to make your visual more meaningful could be totally different thing. In code-wise, I know what I am lacking of- utilizing more dynamic data type. Parsing xml data would be a good example.

More refined version is the image shown below. It took me some time to figure out how to command ‘count’ to size the ellipse, and for the interaction, removing rollover and let some relatively large ellipses with more word frequency stay as they are when applet running.

This game will have two players with two monitors in center facing each player. One player starts game by stabbing the space between fingers at any sequence, then ‘challenger’ should mimic the sequence exactly. In case any mistake was made by the challenger, game will be over.

That’s it. Simple, but rather than ‘following’ the typical rule of five finger fillet, players can create their own rule in very similar way of playing Simon Game. In Simon Game, player should ‘remember’ the sequence of four different colored buttons highlighted and replay it. As number goes higher, the player will have trouble remembering all sequence then make a mistake, game is over.

In fabrication, main platform will be made of wood to create a ‘table’ (this is because knife-skill is played on either a chopping mat or table(like Bishop in Alien2), copper mat will be placed for making scoring areas, Ipac+USB to create keyboard output.

1) What are the three big problems that you expect to have during the production? How will they affect your timeline schedule? How do you intend on solving them up-front?

• Flash! Although what I am planning to build in Flash seems ’simple’, I expect that completing Flash movie files will be the most time-consuming work among others. Therefore, I should put more hours to figure out two-interface for two-players and more complicated scoring system in Flash first, then move to fabricate the whole platform
• Difficulty to trouble-shoot any coding issues - posting them and asking helps fast
• Tendency to get stuck in fabrication - smart way of time-budgeting required

2) Which hardware does your project require? Do you have it all at hand? If not, complete an order of the equipment by next class.

• Wood plate/ Copper Tape(prepared)/ Wires(assorted)/ Ipac(prepared)/Push Buttons(Ordered for testing)
• Two monitors/Two desktops - Exhibition setting (will be requested to admi

3) Provide a timeline of milestones to be acomplish each week, on these dates:

April 1: I missed this class due to my sickness.

April 15: At least one platform for one player should be done in prototyping quality.

Though I came up with how to make the static mouse interaction more dynamic, I wanted to go a little further with ‘video -tracking’. Copying the code that manipulate mouse cursor interaction from last scratch with Vitamin Water bottles image wasn’t difficult, however, the video showed lots of noise which I thought unnecessary. I called my classmate who’s fluent with coding for help to eliminate noise, and he made it. Results are shown below:

As the prototype did, this application initially makes the captured image grayscale, then mouse cursor reveals a kind of ‘curtain’ effect with colorized part of the image.

If your cursor positioned anywhere around top of the screen, it will show black background like above. This effect is basically from Dan’s sample code- grab and brighten.

I got intrigued by Chuck Close’s painting from last class when Dan showed us several artists’ works for inspiration.

blah

After class, Amit and I talked about future direction of ‘what to do’.

What to do:

• divide each circled area to individual area between each finger
• survey ‘Reed Switch’ to elimiante hanging wires
• get Flash work in visual, having all individual area animated

So, I came up with really simple flash work that shows overall concept.
fivefingerfillet3.swf

1)how MDA applies to my fivefingerfillet game:

:Five finger fillet game consists of a physical platform that users could play by place their palm of hand(desirable one is ‘left’) down to table and attempt to stab the space between each finger back and forth with provided ‘knife’. The rule of this game is to stab all the spaces in order, starting from behind the thumb to after the little finger, and back again. With the spaces numbered 1 (behind the thumb) through 6 (after the little finger), the order would be as follows:

1-2-1-3-1-4-1-5-1-6-2-6-3-6-4-6-5-6-4-6-3-6-2-6-1 (repeats) : European rule

1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1 (repeats) : American rule

Above two rules were found from wikipedia.org . Later, I would like to come up with my own rule.

Again, most famous scene of this game is from Alien 2′s cyborg performing knife skill in amazingly fast speed. My game, however, is not ‘harmful’ way because users will not perform with real knife or any sharp material. To avoid any bloody scene but to give a little sense of enjoying game with competition, I decided to form a scoring system dividing four circled-areas with different level. Also, time factor will be limited to certain degree, for example within one minute player should perform.

For aesthetics factor, I think users will be able to exercise a kind of ‘mimic war’ before whether engaging the real knife skill with real knife.  One might find this game rather ‘boring’ just because there are almost zero percent of being hurt so that he can’t be thrilled as much, this can be improved with synchronized Flash interface with scoring system embedded.

2) behavior modification:

Before I use iTunes with iPod, I barely thought seriously about how pirating music file affect the marketplace of music industry, and further more, why people do it and why not. Since I was visually fascinated with the ‘design’ aspect of iPod first, not knowing that the device should be hooked only with iTunes, nothing else, my mind wasn’t prepared to what is going to possibly happen if I attempt to sync it to other people’s music database. Yes, it did happened, not only once, couple of times - wiping out all music files in my iPod when I carelessly hooked it to one of my friends’ desktop hoping that I could ‘add’ more musics on the device.

As a result of this horrible experiences, now I became more alert about synchronizing ‘any’ data, as well as consider my digital files more ‘property’ things that I should care for. I think the argument between who’s right or wrong is meaningless at this point because people keep buying iPods regardless of Apple’s philosophy of digital contents right. However, it wouldn’t be a great thing to be injected any notion from one company side(this time it’s Apple), not learning or reasonably adapting it.

For healthier user experiences, I strongly suggest that the company should provide more freedom for users can make their own decision to ‘what’ to use as contents of the device.

Finally, I came up with several ideas of building One Button Game with Flash + IPAC. It almost felt ridiculous to spend almost two weeks squeezing my brain to just ‘think’ what I am going to create with deceptively simple game interface, but now I can think that time consuming was worthy to get back to our big point from this class - CONSTRAINT.

I’d like to skip writing about former ideas, however, I do want to point out that an attemp to steal Kacie’s brilliant idea - Chopstick - enourmously contributed to organize my scattered thoughts to one point. With chopstick, you could do not only ‘grabing’ food such as sushi but also could do something funny or stupid; poking foods or someone(?). This poking concept hatches another form of physical activity which is ’stabbing’ where I recall famous si-fi movie Aliens 2. In the movie, android Bishop shows his knife skill to one of his crew performing unbelievable speed of stabbing table with a sharp knife(and the guy who put his hand on table screams). This, obviously, is a game and I would like to make this ‘unharmful’ way using some soft materials instead of a deadly weapon.

The graphic above shows the overal idea of how this system will score. Red circle in the center indicates highest scoring area, then next three different circles do lower ones.

When it comes to physical interface, it wil simply consist of ground(circles) and input(stick = knife).

This is it. Simple..simple…simple thing. After I read the article “How to prototype a game in seven days”, I thought I found some definite direction to create my own game, however, no sooner had I approached the final output with IPAC, lots of coding(action script) problem occurred. Yes, I am stuck in Flash’s action world!

The plot of this game is so simple- toss the ball by using of spring which is moving up and down all the time.

wk6_gamedesign2edit.swf