In this recitation, our group of five shared about our final project ideas. Here are summaries of their projects:
Malika’s Maze
Malika and her partner plan to create a maze in Processing in which the user controls a ball going through it with Arduino. The goal of the project is to roll over all the open spaces within the maze, but the challenge is that the ball only stops moving when it hits a wall. She also added that there would be levels, whose difficulty would be determined by how fast the user completed the first maze. I suggested that since the user wouldn’t be familiar with controlling the ball when they first play, the time it takes to complete the first maze wouldn’t be very representative of how skilled the user would be at playing the game. Therefore, it would be helpful to include a tutorial and trial run before the user starts the actual game.
I found it interesting that the ball would only stop once it hit a wall, since this would make it particularly hard to navigate through the maze. However, this is the whole point of the game, which will stimulate the player’s strategic thinking and make them think more critically about how to tackle the maze. After hearing of her new ideas she later made in class, I am excited to see how she integrates different sensors and graphics into her maze.
Citlaly’s Ball of Confusion
Citlaly aims to make an obstacle game similar to Super Mario Bros, but instead the character will be a raceless, genderless ball that has the goal of collecting different obstacles instead of avoiding them. These obstacles represent different challenges in the world today, like college debt and discrimination. To control the ball, users will stomp on a platform to go down, or jump lightly on the platform to go up. The goal of the game is to bring more awareness to the world’s different challenges and educate people on how to address these situations. I really liked the concept of creating a nostalgic game for players while making them more aware of current issues, and am excited to see how she combines entertaining gaming with these serious issues. Citlaly said that the game would have educational popups during the game whenever the ball collected an item, but I pointed out that this may be a little distracting for the player to read the text and play the game at the same time. So, I suggested that the text be put after the game ends. Additionally, our group was a bit wary if the vibration sensors would be able to distinguish jumps from stomps, so Malika suggested using a similar pad to the one used in Dance Dance Revolution.
Caren’s Blurred Picture Game
Caren’s game uses blurred pictures of different well known people, places, and objects to have people compete to guess what the picture is of. Pictures will be blurred on Processing, and users will be shown a list of options to choose from on screen. When they get the answer, they can choose it by pushing a certain button that aligns with the answer onscreen. Caren said that the game could be a multiplayer game that is collaborative or competitive, but said that there would only be one set of buttons to choose answers with. I suggested that another set of buttons be added so that two players could have their own buttons to compete with. Caren also added that the pictures would become more clear as time went on, but I found that this would make things too easy for players, since they could just wait to find the answer. Instead, I suggested that the blurriness would stay constant for each round, but would progressively get more clear with each round if the player kept getting it wrong. I think this project makes great use of the skills we have learned in class, but the playing experience could be heightened by using different sensors instead of just pushing buttons to choose answers.
Robert’s Obstacle Game
Robert wants to use distance sensors to guide a character through an obstacle game. By lowering and raising both hands over the sensor, the character will be able to go left or right and forwards or backwards. We found that the same hand motions for both character movements could be confusing, so we suggested moving one hand a different way so the player can easily distinguish how to move the character. I think this is a very interesting way of controlling a character and look forward to seeing how he will design the graphics of the game.
These projects were all generally along similar lines of my definition of interaction. In each project, users controlled a part of the game with Arduino, which would enact a change in the game, which would then influence how the player continued to play the game.
Feedback Received
After explaining the way our Labyrinth game would work, my group said that they really liked the general concept and thought it was very interesting, but the execution would need to be careful in order to make the game fair for both players. My group suggested that I add a story at the beginning of the game to better inform players of the contextual Greek Mythology. Additionally, Malika brought up that the player controlling the Minotaur would be able to easily win the game by simply waiting at the exit of the maze to catch Theseus, who would need to go through the exit to win. She brought up changing the maze from a birds eye view to a first person player perspective to make it more challenging for both players to navigate the maze. However, we both agreed that this would be extremely hard to code, so the project will most likely not make this change. However, I will now be cautious of designing the maze so that the Minotaur cannot easily find the exit and wait there for Theseus to come.