Concept
For my midterm project, I decided to design an interactive photo lab experience. The user starts the program off with the choice of being a customer for a day or an employee and then that decision guides their experience. As an employee, they have more of a ‘mini game’ experience (comparable to Papa’s Pizzeria on CoolMath) while if they choose to be a customer, it’s more of a learning experience for a beginner film photographer (inspired a bit by Duolingo). My main motivation for this design was based on personal experience because I started working at a photo lab roughly 2 months after I shot my first roll of film so it felt like I was learning a ton as a photographer and an employee super quickly. I also think it would be cool if my job back home could use this as a fun resource for first-time customers.
Code progress
So far, in terms of ‘code-progress,’ I am pretty satisfied with how things are developing. Because the program is split into two sections (customer and employee experience) I devoted this weekend to just working on the employee experience. Working out small kinks has been quite time consuming because of the complexity to with which I want the program to function but I believe it is still manageable (for now). For the most part, I’ve relied on Canva for basic ‘set-design’ just to lighten the load a bit, and for aesthetic reasons so I’ve been working in layers quite a bit.
For example, this is the base layer of the processing room in the employee section. I’ve added different ‘layers’ on top so that depending on the mouse location, the program produces different signifiers that prompt you to open one of the four mini games or return back to the home page.
Most frightening part
Overall, I don’t think the implementation of my ideas will be all that difficult compelte. However, I am frightened by how tediously time consuming it will be, because it’s already taken be a significant amount of time to being making headway on 2 of the mini games. Furthermore, I still haven’t solidified what I want the customer’s side to look like, so I’m afraid that it won’t balance out appropriately with what I’ve already created.
Lastly, there are smaller things I’m holding off on debugging until the framework is fully complete and I’m really hoping that doesn’t prove to be a huge mistake. I’ve implemented the windowWidth components to try and keep my program (mostly) adaptable to any window size but quickly that it ends up distorting some of the images in a weird way and and making the space a bit awkward at times. So, I’m hoping when I circle back at the end it is a fairly easy solution.
As you can see I am relying heavily on windowWidth and windowHeight for a lot of stuff and don’t really know what to expect/how to solve the issue if it starts to not perform the way I’d like.
Nevertheless, I will try to address these concerns by working in segments, as I have been doing. With a project like this, it’d be very easy to become overwhelmed by the ideas, and implementation and everything else going on so I’m trying to keep everything broken down, into more digestible mini projects for me to complete. More specifically, in regards to the formatting concerns I think I’m gonna start recording the ratios of the important objects just have an easily accessible reference for what I’m most concerned about (i.e. making sure the instruction manual is centered). If something small is a little off, or has some slight variation from time to time, I’ll to address it but don’t want to become too fixated on little things.