aram’s blog

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.

I changed my direction to finalize ‘fivefingerfillet’ game for my final and possibly ITP spring show exhibition after 15 minutes meeting with Amit. In order to enhance current piece of work, it appears to be challenging to create more ‘playful’ interface with simple-minded approach - make it ’six-button game’.

I’ve been skeptical of having knife thing even if it’s not harmful, finally decided to get rid of it. Instead of knife, I came up with ‘legs’ mounted on the whole body of system, then each leg would be moving up and down when player presses push buttons on top. They will still can provide similar feeling of ‘knife’ stabbing from top, but only with sound and movement.

One important rule about scoring is not just pressing different buttons fast, but pressing combinations of two buttons fast. For example, each space between fingers could be named as numbers from 1 to 6, then 1-6, 1-5, 1-4… will be the scoring combo.

Also this game will be connected to video of ‘bishop shows his knife skill’ part from the movie Alien2. Seeing the movie clip, players will be encouraged to produce faster speed to make Bill Paxton scream.
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A graph is a collection of elements, usually called nodes, linked together by edges(sometimes called brances). It is a common structure for mapping connections of many related elements. This is partly because the visual representation of a network shows the sort of connectedness that makes sense to someone familiar with the data, whether as a free-form map of associations written out on paper (sometimes called a mind map). - From Visualizing Data by Ben Fry

I decided to show a collection of words by using of “Mind Map” type of graph layout. What I will propose is not a big leap from the quote from the book above, but I believe it’d be a good ‘review’ of this semester doing next steps of data visualization that I have done this midterm - Tree Map.

Contents that I am going to use are up in the air for now, mainly because I want to focus more on the structure of how each element relate each other(e.g. nodes) on either Eclipse or Processing. However, after I presented overall concept, plan and thoughts for my final, Dan gave me a good ‘tip’ and examples of what could be the good ‘contents’ that fill the mind map - participatory platform of collective thoughts(or soul) from audiences. Similar to many mind-mapping software, mine could have blank area that user can fill whatever word that strikes his mind, keep gathering them, and finally shows them in networked map with minimal graphic touch on

Thanks to Maria, my classmate of A2Z, now I have a little sense of analyzing codes samples that I will need.

Inspiration and related links are below.

simple graph demo

Maria’s midterm

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

blah

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

My ‘plan’ was to concentrate more on finding ways to acquire text data from URL by using of XML. But I found it more difficult that I thought it would be, decided that I would pursuit that later on my final, not midterm.

The main idea is to subdivide 2D space to show the relative frequency of each word(from .txt file)in mapping of tree structures.

The code was built mainly from Visualizing Data (Ben Fry, O’reilly) Ch. 7 -Trees, Hierarchies, and Recursion, then I modified it to ‘my version’ of it.

After several trials of modifying the last code for midterm, I came up with some results with slightly different visuals.

Each sample shows different stroke and ellipse size. First three examples are from the same text file from the book-Mark Twain’s Following the Equator, depicting word usage in the book, and forth one’s visuals created from Korean-English dictionary from The Project Gutenberg. The fifth one shows the word usage in The War of the Worlds by H.G.Wells.

Since the text is only drawn if the size of the text is smaller than that of ellipse, for many times it shows ‘blank’ ellipses.

Follow-ups : After in-class presentation, I got lots of helpful feedback both from Dannie and classmates. Among those, I sorted out some very important opinions.

• The sequence of how those ellipses form in visual - For now, it is procedural, my processing code doesn’t contain ‘random’ value. Next time, I should think about how I ‘intentionally’ form whole fragments in visual more successfully.
• Using more dynamic data - Absolutely. This should be my goal for final project. Parsing data from XML should be studied. In fact, one of my classmates showed us the perfect example that I can refer to. Stored text data makes the visual very static.
• Make the visual less ‘arbitrary - Current code is done not by means of any underlying principle or logic, but by whim or some decidedly illogical formula. Using ‘baysean filter’ to build more logic first, then come up with better solution.

Source code here

I showed the result of what I have been working on to the class this morning. The purpose of this short presentation was to ask some problematic parts that I was engaging, however, it went to sort of critique which was a great plus to keep get this project going.

Dan’s reaction was that my work enables user to find hidden message from the image - Vitamin Water bottles.  For some reasons(I am still working on figuring this out.), when mouse moving it ’skips’ the label part of the bottles, so the result appears to be intentionally ‘conveying’ certain message.

Now I’ve changed 80pixel wide strip animated. When mouse stops, the colored bar part starts extends horizontally, then it goes back to where it was before if mouse starts moving again. (this was heavily relied on Young Sang’s assist in coding)

Next step and (probably) a goal would be making the colored bar doing image manipulation such as sharpen or blurring.

simple aram_dfc_key1.swf

This it it. As it says, it’s a simple keyboard interface made from Flash. Each button allows user to manipulate the object(currently it’s a mini robot character).

Somehow my creativity was limited this time to expand this project to next step which can join the IPAC interface as physical input. I played around several switches (see picture above) with IPAC first, realized that lack of idea still