Midterm Project

A.

The Maze Baller – Angela Xi and Stephanie Yip – Eric Parren

B.

The idea of interaction is when something or someone communicates with another something or someone. From many previous projects and interactions I’ve researched they’re all some kind of reaction to something whether it is scripted or not, there will be results. My group project didn’t really impact my midterm project since my midterm project was a game that included puzzles and my group project was a device that turned off emotions. The uniqueness of my project is that it’s a three-level puzzle game and the whole objective is pushing the ball from the top level to the bottom. Our project was intended for people with interaction knowledge because we thought it would make our project more fun and interactive  

C.

The idea of this game is for it to be a maze that includes a different puzzle on each level for the user to solve and escape. We wanted the design of the project to portray the general idea of its, escape. It’s a pretty straightforward design,  you can see each level clearly and each level leads to another. The design of the box was edited as we went cause there were a few miscalculations here and there. The ramps weren’t in the original idea but when we were building it we found that the ball doesn’t land where the next hole would be. One of the major decisions we made was changing our second level from the fan to a revolving spoon so instead of having the ball being blown to the hole we changed it to a spoon pushing it to the hole because the fan wasn’t working the way we wanted. We used mostly cardboard and hot glue since it was easy to shape and we were able to get it from the lab. The choice of using cardboard and hot glue was because it was easy to manipulate but also it was strong enough to hold the components we used for each level.

D.

There were many failures in the process of building the project but it all came together in the end. I was in charge of cutting and putting everything together and ensuring that each level worked with the code. Starting with the top level, was a puzzle that included the stepper motor and we coded it so it only did one rotation and stops. There wasn’t any trouble with this level as we were about to use the design of the stepper motor from the previous recitation. The second level is the one we had the most difficulty with, the original design was to have the fan motor blow the ball to the hole but as we were testing it out the fan was strong enough to blow the ball over the small little hot glue dots we made to secure the ball from going anywhere after it fell down the hole. We tried to use 12v instead of 5v and it kind of worked but we couldn’t have it activated for long or it’ll fry the fan motor. After many tries, we decided to scratch the fan last min and change it to a spoon. We hot glued half of a spoon to the fan motor so it’ll be more successful pushing the ball to the hole and the second level finally worked. This brings us to the last level which we also had a lot of trouble with. For this level we used the servo motor, the idea was that we were going to glue a piece of cardboard to the servo motor and attach the servo motor upside down to the floor of level three so it’ll cover the hole and when activated the cardboard will move away from the hole and let the ball drop. It’s a pretty easy concept yet the servo motor kept malfunctioning. We had tested it out at the lab but when we got home to continue working on it the motor would spasm and the button we attached to it wouldn’t work. Later we found out that servo motors tend to take too much of the power which could mess with the distribution of power between it and the button so we used a different power source for the motor instead. The overall coding wasn’t terrible since most of it was old codes from recitation or class and we just modified it slightly. 

During the user testing session, two of our levels weren’t working and we spent most of it asking the LA to help us with it but when it was tested people were having a lot of trouble figuring out the puzzle. We didn’t change anything about our project after the testing since we thought it was relatively easy and the players were overthinking the whole process of it. The last level that included the button game was a timer-based game and we changed the time window to be larger for the players cause in user testing it was too small for players to stop at. Many players were confused with our puzzle rules so we also made our directions clearer so players could understand the game easier. 

E.

The goal of our project was for it to be fun, and exciting but also challenging. My project did align with my definition of interaction as there were results made from the interaction of someone. My definition of interaction was very simple so my project didn’t not align with it. The project was ultimately too challenging for users and it took too long for them to solve the whole game. If we had more time we would’ve changed our puzzles so it wasn’t just targeted at people from the interaction lab but for everyone and also made it less challenging because it was our main downfall. I learned that what might be simple for the makers isn’t simple for the users and that servo motors sometimes take a lot of power. It was very satisfying to watch people complete each level, even though it took very long, but it was really cool watching people succeed. IMG_7678

This google doc has all the codes and the rules for the game. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OQ_vsZeYyzrebSi1Re6tmbrCwPBLc3beTObq_t6074c/edit?usp=sharing

Here are all the photos and videos of our project. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-HRTWDsp0-neb2-TTIrgOQQcEc2maUQO?usp=sharing

The button game code. https://github.com/ima-nyush/Interaction-Lab-Sp23/blob/main/06.1%20-%20Time%20%26%20State/annoying_game/annoying_game.ino

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