Final Project Reflection: The Wanted by Jamie & Clover – Jamie (Ziying Wang)

Our internet art project: The Wanted is a fictional detective game based on a catastrophe happened in real life. The user is a detective who has been after a criminal for almost ten years, through analyzing past crimes, she suspected that the criminal is going to commit something big soon, despite the police department plans to officially close the case in three days due to the large amount of money and effort wasted on this criminal over the past 10 years, the detective decides to look into the case for one last time and try to take the criminal into custody. The user, as the detective, will submit an information form with the information of the upcoming possible crime he/she deduced from the previous profiles, the results will decide whether the user has performed the right deduction.

Clover and I went through lots of iterations when constructing this project. We started off with Clover drawing four images for background story and I making an image for the timeline page with photoshop. We designed the timeline according to the vague schedule we listed before starting, which includes 10 years (2009-2018) and two of which don’t have crimes, the rest is a crime per year.

Then as we design our cases, a hint we wanted to offer is that the crimes happen in geographic order on the European map, therefore I appended clickable map of Europe on the timeline page.

As the user is required to fill out a form as the final evaluation for the performance, we designed clickable items on the timeline page, one of which leads to the submission page and the other is a screenshot of the sample form.

Originally, the user clicks open different documents and goes back to the timeline to check out others, then we realized that the limitation doesn’t work when the user can click open all windows and has unlimited deduction time. Therefore, I coded the page open time as 20 seconds, when the time is up, the window closes itself. After every eight profiles the user checks, there is audio informing it’s the sleeping hour comes out, indicating that a day has passed. After 24 times checking the profiles, the timeline page will automatically direct the user to the submission form page, where the user has to fill in their deduction result for the upcoming crime.

The evaluation of the results leads to three endings, one of them is the good ending, where the user successfully stopped the crime from happening and took the criminal into custody. The rests are both bad endings, one is the case that the user gets the right time but the wrong location, the ending is that the user arrives at the place in search of the criminal but instead sees the news of the catastrophe happening in another place; if the user gets the time wrong, the ending is only the news on the catastrophe.

Given more time, there would definitely be things I want to improve. One of which is the submission page. Theoretically, according to my current code, the user can open multiple submission pages and try unlimited times, I haven’t come up with a better solution for this because I want to give the user time to think and not set time limit for their submission. Another is that the crimes should be perfected, right now they are too deliberate, and look like something purposely designed so that the user can figure out the hints. The storyline is something I definitely want to put more effort into. After presenting it to the class, we learned that we should have changed our cursor into a pointer when it hovers onto clickable elements so that the user will be clearer about what to click on.

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