Category: F2023 – Mang

Concept

For people who know me, I was a gamer my entire life, and I loved the concept of video games as art. I always believed that games themselves can convey meaning like any other artwork, and for some their aesthetic values might even exceed what people traditionally identify as art. Also due to games’ nature of being an interactive medium, it can achieve much more that traditional art forms cannot. For example, the immersion that games bring to people playing them goes far beyond just viewing them, but actually experiencing them yourselves. Therefore, I decided to look for these artistic values in the earliest games, played on the arcades. When I was reading the webpage on The Art of Video Games exhibition in 2012 on the Smithsonian Art Museum website, I came across this game that I had heard of but never played before (because it was too old, obviously), Pac-Man. I knew it was a famous game and almost as old as Tetris, and then soon found out it was one of the first video games that “took this leap beyond the arcade, beyond the screen, into the broader popular culture. That changed the way the world looked at video games and understood that there was something bigger happening here than just a place to waste a quarter.” I took a great interest in this and decided to modify it by combining some other game elements into it and upgrading its interface for my midterm assignment.

I plan to leave the core gameplay of Pac-Man alone and focus on other aspects of the game. In the original version of the game, The map is always the same. I want to combine some roguelike game elements into my project by randomly generating the map every time the player resets the game. therefore the player would always get a new experience when in the game. I also want to make it an endless mode, therefore the player can play to update their personal records. I plan to achieve that by using the tunnels on the left and right sides of the map. Once the player finishes eating all the dots in one map, the tunnels turn into portals that teleport them to other maps with different backgrounds and different theme songs.

Functions and Classes

In this game, I think the main classes are Ghosts, Map, Player, Dots, and Game.

For ghosts, the four types of ghosts (Blinky (red), Pinky (pink), Inky (cyan), and Clyde (orange)) inherit the Ghost class. The Ghost class has certain attributes: intposition for identifying its absolute position, also responsible for calculating destination position; realposition for identifying the true position of the ghost and for determining collisions; targetposition for identifying the target the ghost tries to reach; speed for the speed of the ghosts, and state for determining the current state the ghost is in for it to have different actions. The functions the Ghost class includes are checkCollision, updateTarget, stateChange, directionUpdate, etc. In these functions, updateTarget is different for different types of ghosts.

For the map, it will only have a few attributes. One is a 2D array used to represent the map, and one is its state. it will only have one function, that is mapGen, called every time it is initialized.

For Player, it will have attributes: intposition, realposition, direction, and speed. The only functions it will have are movement and checkDot.

For Dots, the only attribute is its position and type, and the only function is to destroy itself after being touched.

Lastly, for the game class, will have attributes such as points, lives, gamestate(pause, ongoing, in between, etc). It will take care of loading each state of the game and contain data necessary to keep the game going.

This is just a brief outlook of what the system would be like. In practice, some parts may be modified.

Uncertain Part of Project

I find the most uncertain part to be the random map generator. I need to come up with a set of rules so that the map is playable and won’t include too many long corridors the player can be cornered, long dead ends, or areas the player cannot access. However, I have made a preliminary generator that follows one set of rules. This set of rules makes sure that the map is different every time and will not have corridors with width 2 in it. However, this set of rules could result in inaccessible areas. Right now I have an idea about another set of rules to be applied after this so that the inaccessible areas and dead ends can be connected to the other corridors so that the map could be more reasonable. I plan to make any tile that should be accessible with only one or fewer connections with other accessible tiles have at least two connections with other accessible tiles. There will be tiles that cannot find two connection points. Then this tile will be discarded into a wall tile. This process will repeat until no action can be done, and a usable map is then created. I haven’t implemented the second rule set yet, but I have a prototype of the first rule set and it yields satisfying results. It generates grids shown below:

Therefore I am confident that this map generator will be achievable, and I only need to tweak some details.

DiDecor- decorate the room and interact with the character

My concept: When I was a child, I used to play games involving the decoration of rooms of different kinds. When Professor Mang showed the example of a midterm coffee shop, I recalled this experience as the coffee shop looked a lot like one of those games. While looking at that project, I really wanted to change the furniture and play around with the different images. At that moment, I realized that I would like to create my own game with room decoration, so the furniture such as sofas, cupboards, tables, etc could be changed as shown in Fig 1. Fig 1. Room decor game example. Source: 1,334 × 750

The interactivity of the game: I will create an array of images of each of the furniture types, which can be changed by clicking the mouse on top of that particular piece of furniture, and the last shown picture will remain in the game until the user clicks one more. Additionally, I would like to create a character, who lives in this room. The user can move the character and make her sit, and talk with another character (this one isn’t movable) when clicking on that character. I liked the idea of the radio, which changes the music by clicking or stopping it. I would like to implement that with the TV or radio as well because the music sets the vibe of the room too. Additionally, if I have time, I would like to add the story at the beginning of the game how the young lady bought the house and wants the interior designer (the user) to create a design of the room and explain the rules of the game such as which buttons to click. 

Complex part of the game and minimization of risk: First, one of the challenging parts would be finding the images of pieces of furniture. Secondly, talking about the code, it seems hard for now to set the conversation between the characters. For now, I am thinking about making conditionals, so the user can choose what to answer from the given options and the reply of another character changes depending on that answer. If this is too complicated, I will make a random conversation. Each time the user clicks on the second character, a random conversation is generated between the characters, so each time, they are talking about different things but without the interaction of the user. 

 

Concept

For my midterm project, I have decided to implement a puzzle for the user to solve, “Black and White Hat Puzzle”. The puzzle typically goes something like this:

There are 5 hats: 3 black and 2 white. Three characters can see each other’s hats but not their own. They must figure out the color of their own hat based on what they see on the others’ heads, using logic and deduction.

Design

I will implement this puzzle as the user to be one of the three characters wearing a hat, and can see the other two people’s hat. The user needs to correctly guess the hat color he/she is wearing. The user can make only 2 guesses.

If the user can’t make the right guess, the solution will be presented to the user.

A simple wireframe:

Challenging Part

• Drawing the each elements and characters on the canvas
• Assigning the hats randomly to the characters and displaying it
• Building the algorithm behind explaining how the user should solve the puzzle correctly.

Risk Prevention

• I will not draw everything on the canvas, but I will draw them on my ipad and insert them as images to the canvas.
• Assign each of the hats values (and an image of white or black hat) and randomly choose one of them and display it on the screen (on each characters’ head). But the hat of the user must be hidden until user makes the correct guess or two guesses.
• Depending on the other two characters’ hat, the guessing logic must be one of the following:
  1. If a character sees that both of the other characters are wearing white hats: In this case, the character deduces that their own hat must be black. This is because if they were also wearing a white hat, it would mean that there are two white hats in total, which contradicts the given hat distribution.
  2. If a character sees one white hat and one black hat on the other two characters: In this scenario, the character cannot deduce the color of their own hat based solely on this information. They don’t have enough information to determine their own hat color. Their guess would be uncertain.
  3. If a character sees that both of the other characters are wearing black hats: In this situation, the character can deduce that their own hat must be white. This deduction is made based on the knowledge that there are only two white hats and three black hats in total. If they were also wearing a black hat, it would result in three black hats, which contradicts the given hat distribution.

The author outlines several ways computer vision can be enhanced to work on identifying human beings which include but are not limited to using retro reflective marking material. This raises multiple questions in my head about the efficiency of the programs if it only works under certain conditions. I know that this is considered a huge improvement when compared to earlier solutions however I find it interesting that the author is overlooking the main problem which is that having people wear retro reflective film to be detected by the program makes the program non reusable which in turn makes it inefficient. 

The author also mentions how the program would only be able to detect objects that can be described using code or by relating it to other objects the computer understands which further makes me question whether it is reliable to use in all cases. 

The reading made me wonder how much this technology has advanced since this article has been written considering the amount of facial recognition, virtual reality and augmented reality softwares that have emerged and are being used more frequently and more accurately.

concept

My favorite thing about media is its ability to tell stories. Particularly, in interactive media such as video games, the storytelling is incredibly immersive as the viewer has some agency in navigating the way they experience those stories. For this reason, for my midterm project, I wanted to engage in some sort of storytelling. What I envision is something that is at the intersection of being a game/a visual story. I want to have a character that moves in an explorable region and interacts with different objects in the scene to get bits and pieces of the story.

Ideally, it would look similar to something like below, but it would have more distinct objects and probably only one playable character. I also want the setting and the story I’m trying to convey to be somewhat personalized to me and some of my own experiences, though I’m not exactly sure what yet.

design

For the design, I think I am going to heavily utilize images for more rich scene-setting/worldbuilding. I would like the interactive objects, however, to be made in p5.js, so it’s easier to allow the player to interact with.  I also would make visuals to convey the story, that would need to be drawn.

challenging

My main worry in this project is that it relies very heavy on visuals. I’m not exactly the best artist, so I’d need to find specific sprites for the story that I want to tell and background images. In addition, because I want some element of story telling through visuals similar to graphic novels, I’ll have to think about how to get those as well.

In addition, I’m worried about how to handle all these different aspects, especially transitions between different states (as this was something I struggled with in our last assignment as well).

how I plan to handle it 

I think some part of it would be through finding assets online, and other would be finding creative ways to develop those as well, such as perhaps drawing them myself to make the project more personal.

For the more complicated/technical challenges, I think the best solution is to make the story as succinct as possible and start small. I’ll implement the small functionality first – such as making a few objects interactive – and only having one animating object. If I figure out how to do that, the rest should be easy hopefully.

The interactive artworks seemed quite interesting but what caught my attention more were the elementary computer vision techniques. I’m always curious to know what goes on behind the scenes so understanding how motion and presence are detected was fascinating. Just as I was thinking about real time issues these could pose with reference to the physical environment, the next paragraph highlighted these and the possible optimization solutions like dim light, thermal imaging and more, I wonder how plausible and multifaceted these are considering the diversity of environments users might be operating from.

However, amidst the technical intricacies of this reading, there was a line that struck me.’In designing systems to “see for us,” we must not only become freshly awakened to the many things about the world which make it visually intelligible to us, but also develop a keen intuition about their ease of computability.‘ This encapsulated the essence of Computer Vision to me and also added some meaning to it beyond code. This whole concept of being awakened to our surroundings, takes me back to something that I try to practice – being mindful about simple things around me. Combining this with code seems like the perfect combination to work on.

As I find this field of Computer Vision quite interesting and fun, I definitely want to learn more and explore its applications in further projects. I would also read up more in-depth about this specifically, the algorithms, the issues that may come up and possible ways to solve them.

This week’s reading particularly piqued my curiosity, as I have often heard/read about computer vision, but never in the context of Interactive Art. The reading adequately introduces the difficulties within the field and brings up notable artworks that utilize technology like this. It was interesting to see the different ways computer vision could be used.

The pieces that caught my attention were the ones about surveillance. My favorite piece was Sorting Daemon. The composition of the given snapshot generated by the project reminds me of many avant-garde artworks, which is not only aesthetically pleasing – but also eerie, considering that the artwork is being generated from real people’s faces, regular unaware passers-by. I can not imagine how odd it must be to see a machine reconstruct your physical self, using your likeness to construct silhouettes that only appear vaguely human. The existence of this artwork in of itself feels like a paradox – critiquing surveillance while enabling it as well.

Another piece that causes similar conflicting feelings is the morbid Suicide Box. I think the art piece, while exploring themes of surveillance, presents ethical questions at the cross-section of technology, art, and interactive media. Does the piece’s intention – measuring the ‘despondency index’ – justify the technology used?

Both these pieces inspire a conversation about computer vision in interactive media art – not only raising the question of how far we should go, but also if we should.

Concept

While the holiday season may still be almost 80 days away, this midterm project allows me to bring a touch of early Christmas magic into our lives, especially amidst the upcoming academically intensive weeks. My project is designed to immerse users in an interactive Christmas wonderland, where they can experience the joy and festivity of this cherished time of year.

Design

In this experience, I aim to blend various elements to incorporate the spirit of Christmas. Users will have the opportunity to enjoy the following:

• They will be able to decorate their own Christmas tree by dragging and dropping ornaments of their choice
• Snow using the concept of noise
• A mini game revolving around the idea of collecting presents. Either in the form of a hidden objects game or a secret santa game
• A Santa claus, gracefully traveling across the night sky in his reindeer-drawn sleigh
• A collection of Christmas carols playing in the background.

Inspiration:

What I’m uncertain of

One of the primary challenges I anticipate in this project is managing the display of multiple elements on the screen. I think that creating a cozy Christmas wonderland with various components like the Christmas tree, the presents game, and Santa’s journey while maintaining a visually pleasing and harmonious composition can be tricky. All the elements of this project seem quite simple and basic but  managing them together might become chaotic.

How I plan to handle it

To address this challenge, I plan to implement a structured approach. I will utilize multiple classes and functions to keep it organized. For segments like the game, users will have the option to zoom in and play, ensuring that the main screen retains a clean and inviting appearance

I’m excited to continue coding this prelude to the holiday season

For my midterm project, I’m drawing inspiration from the cherished game my sister and I used to play on our PSP, featuring Sonic, and giving it an endearing and personal twist. I’ll be introducing my beloved dog, Simba, into the world of gaming.” Simba’s Pawtastic Adventure” centers around Simba’s quest to gather delicious treats and his favorite toys as he embarks on a journey to find his way back home to his family. Simba will journey through enchanting landscapes while avoiding obstacles like puddles, bushes and other obstacles.

Gameplay Overview:

• Character: Simba, the adorable and loyal dog with a heart full of love and a tummy full of treats to collect.
• Objective: Accompany Simba through a whimsical world filled with colorful landscapes while gathering his favorite treats and toys.
• Obstacles: Simba must navigate around playful puddles, fluffy bushes and other challenges.
• Homecoming: The ultimate goal is to reunite Simba with his family, making it a heartwarming experience for players.
• Scoring: Players earn pawprints as they collect Simba’s treasures, with bonus pawprints for completing levels fast.
• Feedback: Adorable animations and joyful sounds upon collecting items, plus a heartwarming “Family Reunion” animation when Simba finds his family.

With Simba’s Pawtastic Adventure, my aim is to not only transport players back to the  days of playing online games but also envelop them in a world filled with the purest form of love and warmth – the love between a furry friend and their family.

While I haven’t started coding the game yet, I anticipate challenges in achieving smooth and responsive movement for Simba, especially when it comes to jumping and implementing gravity in a way that feels natural. Additionally, handling collision detection with obstacles and surfaces may prove to be complex. To overcome these challenges, I intend to break down the game development process into smaller, manageable sections. By tackling smaller chunks of the game at a time, I can focus on refining specific aspects without feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of the entire project.

The reading delves into the realm of computer vision, a technology that enables computers to comprehend images and videos. It discusses a significant transformation: how computer vision has evolved into a field that is now accessible to anyone. This transformation has been facilitated by the development of new tools, the emergence of open-source communities where people freely share their work and the availability of more affordable video equipment. In the past, computer vision was highly complex and primarily reserved for experts, but today, it is a resource that regular individuals, including students and artists, can leverage to accomplish exciting projects.

One project discussed in the reading that stood out for me  is “Videoplace,” an interactive art installation developed by Myron Krueger between 1969 and 1975. In this installation, a participant stands before a backlit wall functioning as a projection screen. The system digitizes the participant’s silhouette and analyzes their real-time posture, shape and gestures. What’s striking is how this technology was conceived and implemented decades ago when our technological capabilities were far less advanced. It serves as a precursor to contemporary innovations like facial recognition in Apple iPhones.

We are currently observing a growing incorporation of computer vision in interactive art installations and diverse applications. Computer vision has become increasingly accessible and smoothly integrated into our everyday routines, elevating a broad spectrum of functionalities beyond the realm of art. These encompass healthcare, transportation, security and entertainment, signifying its pivotal role in our contemporary existence.