Project Concept & Design
For my midterm project, I wanted to make something that was a little different. Looking at past projects, I noticed that all the sketches used a ton of colors and soft shapes that created an aesthetically pleasing and welcoming environment for the user. So I thought, why not this time, I make the user uncomfortable? Of course, I can’t know the different things that make various people uncomfortable, so this interactive artwork + game is based on things that make me uncomfortable.
Basically, it’s a series of challenges that the user must get through in order to win. But each challenge is supposed to evoke some sort of uncomfortable emotion/feeling (hopefully) within the user. The design is such that there are 8 doors, 
behind each of which is a challenge that the user must complete. Once the user has clicked on a door, they are trapped in that room until they successfully complete the challenge. Only then are they given the option to return to the hallway and go through another door. The only colors I aim to use across this game is black, white, and red, as I think it throws people off and adds to the overall mood I’m going for.
Production & The most frightening part
There were two things I was most worried about. First was making the hallway. This is because I couldn’t find the right kind of doors online, and had to design my own using Canva, and then go through the complicated process of cutting out backgrounds, resizing, and figuring out the coordinates on the canvas for each door so that they align in a perfect one-point perspective. That said, I’m pretty happy with how the end result turned out.
Second, I had imagined that it would take a lot of work to implement the general algorithm for the game. That means the structure of dividing it into different rooms, coding a timed mini game for each room (while keeping everything in theme), and keeping the user trapped in a room until they solved it. To minimize this risk, I decided to divide the code into different game states, so that whenever I need to add the code for a new door, for example door 2, I can just add the required code and set the game state to room 2 and test it out. Also for elements like the popups and the timer, which get used for every door, I made them into reusable functions so that I can just call them for every door, only with different arguments (popup messages) based on what I want. Hopefully, for every door I can continue to have the format I have implemented now, which is an initRoom__ and drawRoom__ function for each door. Then it’s pretty much just following the same pattern 8 times.
Risks/Issues
My biggest problem right now is that I may have overestimated my abilities by choosing to do 8 rooms. I’m going to have to think of 8 different mini-game ideas that make people uncomfortable and implement it in the given time frame.
Next Steps
Currently I’ve only implemented 2 rooms. I need to implement the other 6, as well as decide on what to do for the end page of the game when the user finishes all the challenges. I also need to decide on a background soundtrack that will run for the entire game. I also haven’t been able to think of a name for this project yet, and that’s pretty important.
It’s much better to view the sketch in full-screen: https://editor.p5js.org/siyonagoel/full/VcTSl8x7V