Course

So... this is what i come up with in a week for the 534 class...

The plane in the game is constantly pulling down by the gravity and your job is to pull it up by making sound to the microphone. The higher the sound intensity the higher the plane goes. However, you must be careful not to hit anything within the game. The six sided spinning polygons are your enemies, you must peak the sound input in order for the plane to produce a bullet which will kill them off. Orange polygon will move while blue are stationary. IF THE PLANE IS PRODUCING A BULLET EVERY TIME YOU MAKE A SOUND, PLEASE LOWER THE MICROPHONE SENSITIVITY FOR PROPER GAME PLAY.

BTW... if you found this game too difficult... press space bar to cheat... :P

Enjoy~ (hopefully) :)



======= CLICK HERE FOR THE GAME =======

Dynamic Pong is a simple flash game which draws on similar logic as the game “Ink-Pen” in Window Vista. The game allows the user to change the rolling ball’s directions by ‘drawing’ dynamic barricades, meaning that the ball would bounce against the line drew by the player. Dynamic Pong essentially borrowed this idea to redesign the classic Pong game.

In the game, the user will first choose between a ‘free mode’ and a ‘game mode’, the ‘free mode’ is just a practicing playground for players to enjoy controlling a ball using self-drew lines. In the ‘game mode’, things get a little bit more interesting. The player must be able to keep the ball within the screen by blocking it with lines. However, only one continuous line can be drawn at a time and that it will self disappear within 3 seconds so that it is impossible to trap a ball by drawing a line around it. One new ball will be generated every 20 seconds to increase the difficulty of the game. The top and bottom borders would also move to left and right every 30 seconds.



BIGGER ~~~~~~~

Since I guess everyone in CTIN534 is posting their game projects, here's a link to mine:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/laikafawkes/walk-straight

It's a game about navigating a space. It's called "Walk Straight." Hope you enjoy it.

for some reason i feel like this project belongs to this blog....

THE SHOW

A VIDEO DOCUMENTATION

For our third assignment in CTIN 534 (Experiments in Interactivity) we were tasked with creating a navigable space which should "convey a sense of space based on the collaboration of the author with the viewer: the author formulates a space within which the viewer can decide by himself or herself in which direction to proceed, where to look and how to read the space in such a way that the exploration follows a dramaturgical development." I've created a pastoral scene for viewers to explore, which is timed well with this weekend's activities.

Click here to explore Pastorale in full screen and with sound!

The assignment was to explore a space. This is my interpretation of the assignment. Unfortunately, I wrote the USC piece in AS3 and the Turtle one in AS2, and merging the two was not feasible. So I couldn't really create the integrated piece that I wanted too.
Anyways here are the flash apps :)



Click the green buttons, and after the short clip click the screen to go back to the menu. (This flash app is pretty big, so it might take a bit to load.)

With the enormous success of online casual games and the Wii, we've seen that there is a huge market of people wanting to play games. We've seen that a game made to appeal to the larger market of people can sell more copies, and gain more money, than those created for the niche market of people with the latest graphics cards. The more universal the appeal of the game the more successful it is.

We know this. This is true for most media.

But we find in other forms of media, the focus on the specific. The home video, the journal entry, the mother's lullaby. Sometimes these are incomprehensible to those outside the intended audience, and sometimes these are universal. What makes the difference?

Is there an equivalent in games?

You can download the sample code for both parts of the Flash introduction.

The first part is lightweight and includes only code and vector-content:
Download sample code part 1 (172 kB)

The second part is a bit heavier since it contains some sample audio files, bitmaps, and compressed video files:
Download sample code part 2 (31.3 MB)

You can download the slides from the general programming intro and application overview here:
Download slides

Here are the slides of the lecture "Narrative Spaces" discussing the third assignment: Download slides.

You can download the from the second lecture of week 5 here as a PDF.

By Popular demand - here are the slides from the Monday lecture: Download PDF.

My fellow classmates,

Can we distinguish interactivity as anything you can touch move through, or change and immersion as the word for whatever else? David's notion of immersion in a novel works so much better for me if we call these both "the same" as well as different - regarding tools versus no tools & methods of receiving information/story. I know it seems stupid to have two words that ought to go hand in hand mean such complicated different things, but maybe that would reduce confusion and frustration.
We should make a list of interactive tools versus immersive information. We just need to include our own brains in some people's definition of immersion, which I still don't really see as immersion (because the, somehow, since my mind is always so many places, I would not seem to exist) but am willing to use the word if we can better attach meaning to it. Then we can use these words more freely and know what everyone means whether we completely agree or not.
Is this a good idea to put into use?
We should make our own definitions whenever we find ourselves lacking the right words for expressing ourselves.
IM Dictionary!!

Am I making sense?

As a visual recapitulation of our second week's lecture you can download the slides here.

The Institute for Multimedia Literacy was so friendly to make some more lab space available to all of you. With your USC-ID cards you access the building of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and use computers in the blue or in the green lab on the ground floor. Since the IML is using the labs also for classes, please make sure that you only use the equipment when it is available. Generally the green lab is more available the the blue one (and less cold).

You can find the Institute for Multimedia Literacy on:
746 West Adams Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90089



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Here are the slide of the lecture as a downloadable PDF.

You video tutorial explaining depth of field at this site. The tutorial makes reference to a DOF adapter, which is a device that can be attached to a normal video camera to enhance the possibilities to control depth of field. We will not work with those adapters - but the explanation is worthwhile anyways.

A manual for the settings for the Sony PD 150 camera can be found here.

I am uploading the slides for the first lecture here. You can view them as a PDF

To make sure everybody has the schedule of the class including all project dates you can download the syllabus here.

This may go without saying, but since those of us waiting on SPO production numbers (and therefore equipment) won't have access to a camera before Monday's 534 class, will we be doing the assignment in-class?