Planning Stage

Before we began to work, we needed to sort out a grand variety of details. Which materials were we going use?  How would we use them? When would we meet and build our project? Given that Lily is a senior and has her capstone paper due in less than 2 days, and her presentation a few days before the final submission, our team needed to make sure we were properly managing our time and planning realistic deadlines according to our schedule. We wrote a detailed outline with parts of our project and internal deadlines that we plan to keep in order to make our project the best final project. During this initial planning meeting, we also gave our project the name Dance Breaker. It is an ode to breakdancing AND hints to how the game will work: the music will stop (break) and you need to press the sensors to un-break it. Get it?

SEE OUR PLAN HERE

We also created our internal deadline system into google calendar and set working hours. Once we had our work cut out for us, we began the execution of our plan.

Building Progress

Game Mechanics:

• • •  We worked mostly on the P5.js code for the songs and serial connection. To do this he constructed a board with smaller sensors and pieces from a previous project that would allow for testing on a smaller scale. He also began to work with computer vision. The current p5.js sketch loads pixels and has a light threshold akin to previous class exercises. It took a long time to figure out how to mirror the image in order to have a comprehensive experience. Furthermore, he built conditional statements so that all sensors need to be pressed in order for a song to play. The arduino code should not require any changes after today except for the addition of the reward system.
    • Next steps for the game mechanics are:
      • • Implement a functioning random timer (which was already created but not aligned with the music) to stop the song randomly and resume the game.
        • Randomize the sensors that need to be pressed in order for the music to continue.
        • Add a design to the computer vision beyond a threshold.

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
 
}
void loop() {
  int oneValue = analogRead(A0);
   
  int twoValue = analogRead(A1);

  int threeValue = analogRead(A2);
 
  int fourValue = analogRead(A3);
   
  int fiveValue = analogRead(A4);


        
    int sensorValue = oneValue;
    Serial.print(sensorValue);
    Serial.print(",");
    sensorValue = twoValue;
    Serial.print(sensorValue);
    Serial.print(",");
    sensorValue = threeValue;
    Serial.print(sensorValue);
    Serial.print(",");
    sensorValue = fourValue;
    Serial.print(sensorValue);
    Serial.print(",");
    sensorValue = fiveValue;
    Serial.print(sensorValue);
    Serial.println();
    delay(1);     

  }

Physical Component: Dance Mat and Projector

• • • We booked the necessary materials (a vertical projector, a camera) through the portal.
    • We also picked up the necessary sensors and acrylic to build our dance mats. We ran some simple tests with the materials in order to make sure that they work as imagined, and have begun to build the illustrator sketches for the laser cutting.
    • Next steps for the physical components are:
      • Finish the illustrator design and laser cut the materials
      • Print Stickers and Logo
      • Cut and assemble the base.

This week was an especially difficult one because I had a lot of deadlines and tasks and responsibilities that needed to be done within the short time period of a week and adding to that I was just finding it quite hard to get the inspiration to create a piece of art. But thankfully it finally dawned on me and I decided to pursue a rather cliche idea but give it a twist thanks to all that I have learned in the recent days about Processing.

So I ended up creating my own idea of the big bang and created a star that can be controlled to be bigger or smaller and if it is bigger than a specific size, it erupts and ends up in an asteroid blast.

Difficulties:

• As I mentioned before, I was really struggling to get an idea this week and tried coming up with multiple ideas to see what might work. However, none of them seem to really appeal to me but thankfully I decided to pursue the Big Bang Idea in the end.
• The big challenge that I was facing apart from actually getting an idea to make something, was to get the asteroids to work. I had experimented with multiple different ways of trying to make them appear out of the screen but every time I tried a technique I would run into some kind of problems. Sometimes, the asteroids would not spawn properly, other times they would not move the way I wanted them to (appear out of a screen in a 3D sort of fashion) and basically would not give out the right sense of an asteroid blast that I had imagined.

Resolution:

• In order to solve the asteroid problem, I decided to watch some videos that TheCodingTrain had made regarding a similar problem and found out that the best solution to this is to actually use the concept of classes. And so to implement that I made an asteroid class and added the functions, show and update to it. This allowed me to create multiple asteroids and then manipulate them in the way I wanted. Thus, the utilization of OOP helped me solve this problem.

Elements in the project

• The project has two scenes – one of an exploding star and the other that of an asteroid blast. It revolves around the concept of a big star bursting so as to create an asteroid shower. The player can control the size of the star – making it bigger or smaller. Once the star reaches a certain limit of the size, going beyond that would cause it to explode and release an asteroid shower. At every point in the visual, the user can pause the animation and play it again and can also make it go faster or slower (done by altering the Frame Rate). During the asteroid shower, the user can control the speed by which the asteroids come using the mouse. Sliding it to the right will increase the speed whereas going to the left will decrease it.

Concepts Learned:

• This project taught me how to better utilize the random and noise functions better along with obviously teaching me how to use loops to create art works. By using random and noise in this project, I sort of got this understanding that a noise is a more controlled expression of generating a random number between a specified range and the fact that its value is retained (or remembered) whereas in random I feel like the generation of random numbers is more uncontrolled and more dispersed if I were to say.
• I learned to implement the concepts of OOP in processing.

Project Video:

I will be uploading a vlog about my experience with this project soon by tonight!

Project Code:

//this artwork is a depiction of a big bang and the asteroids that come after that
float speed = 0.01;   //for noise value of the star, determines the pace of the vibration like movement
float extent = 0.7;  //for noise value of the star, determines the limit to which size comes up and goes down
int StarSize = 10;   // variable star size that increases and decreases 

float StrokeSpeed = .01;  
float StrokeExtent = 0.7;
int StrokeSize = 5;     //for the throbbing effect of orbits

float noiseStrokeValue;    
float noiseStarValue;

color bg_color; 


float Asteroid_speed;    //to determine speed of asteroid



class Asteroid
{
  float Asteroid_x;
  float Asteroid_y;
  float Asteroid_d;


  Asteroid() 
  {
    Asteroid_x = random(-width, width);
    Asteroid_y = random(-height, height);
    Asteroid_d = random(width);  //helps create an illusion that it is a 3d space 
  }

  void update() {
    Asteroid_d -= Asteroid_speed;
    if (Asteroid_d < 1)
    {
      Asteroid_x = random(-width, width);
      Asteroid_y = random(-height, height);
      Asteroid_d = width;
    }
  } //allows for movement

  void show_Asteroid() {
    fill(255);
    noStroke();
    float sx = map(Asteroid_x/Asteroid_d, 0, 1, 0, width);
    float sy = map(Asteroid_y/Asteroid_d, 0, 1, 0, height); //taking a ratio and then increasing and decreasing it to make it look 3d
    float size = map(Asteroid_d, 0, width, 16, 0);
    ellipse(sx, sy, size, size);
  }  //shows random asteroids on screen
};

//Asteroid class to create asteroids and to update and show them on screen



Asteroid[] asteroids = new Asteroid[400]; // 400 Asteroids created
void setup() {
  size(640, 480);

  for (int i = 0; i<asteroids.length; i++)
  {
    asteroids[i] = new Asteroid();    // each element is made into an instance of the Asteroid class
  }
}

void draw() {

  background(bg_color);
  Asteroid_speed = map(mouseX, 0, width, 0, 20); //speed controlled by mouse Pointer
  if (StarSize < 510)  //first star gets bigger
    Big_Bang();
  else
    AfterMath();  //after a certain size it bursts and asteroids follow
}





void Big_Bang() {
  bg_color = color(0);
  noFill();
  translate(width/2, height/2);
  stroke(255);
  noFill();



  for (int s=2; s<8; s++)
  {

    strokeWeight(random(s));
    arc(0, 0, s*100+80, s*100, 0, TWO_PI);  //6 orbits created
  }

  noiseStrokeValue = noise(frameCount*StrokeSpeed);
  noiseStrokeValue += StrokeExtent;
  noiseStrokeValue *= StrokeSize;  //adding flashing effect to orbit
  
  noiseStarValue = noise(frameCount*speed);
  noiseStarValue += extent;
  noiseStarValue *= StarSize;  //adding movement to star

 

  stroke(255, 255, 0);
  fill(255, 255, 0);
  strokeWeight(noiseStrokeValue);
  circle(0, 0, noiseStarValue); //making star
}




void AfterMath()
{

  translate(width/2, height/2);
  for (int i = 0; i<asteroids.length; i++)
  {
    asteroids[i].update();
    asteroids[i].show_Asteroid();
  }
}




void keyPressed()
{
  if (key == 'a') //slow
  {
    
    frameRate(frameRate-20);
  }

  if (key == 'b') //pause
  {
    noLoop();
  }

  if (key == 'c') //play
  {
    loop();
  }
  
  if (key == 'k') //fast
  {
    
    frameRate(frameRate+20);
  }

  if (key == 'w') //increase_Star_size
  {
    StarSize += 50;
    print(StarSize);
  }

  if (key == 's') //decrease_Star_size
  {
    StarSize -= 50;
    print(StarSize);
  }
}

void keyReleased()
{
  frameRate(60);
}