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 ~~~~~~~

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

THE SHOW

A VIDEO DOCUMENTATION

Siggraph 2010.

Conference July 26-30, 2010
Exhibition July 27-29, 2010

Los Angeles Convention Center

Tracy suggested volunteering for this event.

The idea of failure as a core part of the design process has come up a lot recently, and I was reminded by another blog post about the rant that I gave at GDC 2006 as part of the IGDA Academic Summit. I realized that I never posted this rant, so thought I would do so now since it seems to have become topical again. Enjoy!

The topic of my rant is ‘failure.’ Obviously, none of us likes to fail. Especially students. Students are terrified of failing. They are so afraid of failing that they often forget that university is the one place where they should fail. Where they are -- or should be -- in an environment that rewards the type of intellectual and artistic risk-taking that leads to failure 99 percent of the time. Because failure is an integral part of exploring new idea spaces.

"Players who install the Viz application on their phone can expect an ambient 'always on' play experience that exists within the flow of their everyday lives. Players engage with Viz when they have spare moments in public spaces..."

Here's the link to my casual mobile augmented reality game treatment:

http://remotedevice.net/projects/viz/

Here is my game treatment for this week: A casual Facebook app called the Virtual Fridge.
Not sure if I'd ever actually play the thing, but enjoy.


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View image

Overview

Scattergrams is a literary composition toy designed for deployment over social networking websites. It provides the player with a daily delivery of seemingly random words and challenges them to quickly re-arrange those words into an interesting message that will be automatically sent to their friends at the end of each play session. In addition to free-form play, Scattergrams also includes cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes.

Here is a link to a pdf copy of my game design idea, World Explorer: The Dawning Tribes.

Download file

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?

Last week during Design for Interativity, Professor Fullerton used "baseball" and "submarines" as two ideas that probably wouldn't work well together in the same game. During the rest of the class, the subject of "Submarine Baseball" came up numerous times, causing increasingly moderate mirth. It kept reappearing. It was in danger of becoming a localized meme. I had to do something, fast.

Looking to lay the matter to rest once and for all, I took the challenge of designing a Submarine Baseball game. It's kind of a copout, in that there aren't actually animated submarines hitting a spheroid by swinging their periscopes or anything, but it's the best I could do.

View Treatment for "Submarine Baseball"

Here is a pdf copy of my analysis of Modern Art.

Download file

Overview

Elfenland is a board game by Alan R. Moon for 2-6 players about a group of young elves who must travel through the world as part of a coming of age ritual. The manual states that it is a revised version of a game called Elfenroads which was not played as part of this analysis.

The actual competition part of a game is not generally what I like about a game. Believe it or not. Yes, you guys in my group for board games probably think I'm just super competitive, but I'm not really. I actually prefer games where I'm not pitted against other people in the room. Seriously! And come on, none of you actually lost a limb or eyeball or anything...

It's funny how Monopoly has gotten many hours of my life, deep in the competition of it all, and I actually don't really like to play it solo versus everyone else. Well, okay this depends on who I play it with. I suppose that's part of it. I really enjoyed playing both Ticket to Ride and Modern Art with my group in that I enjoyed playing with the group. I feel like we all got to "bond" over the game. In spite of how much I didn't like Modern Art, nor did I like losing... or being screwed over.

Since I'm not usually up for competitive games because I don't like being head to head so much, I have a hard time with the realization and acceptance of something Tracy was saying in class tonight. She only just touched on it: how Americans never want to play harder, more complex games because they don't want to learn how to play and then since they've never played they really don't want to bother to learn and play even more. That's funny to me, although it does strike me as true, because I don't mind learning a complicated game (although I get impatient and want to start and learn as I go more than to just sit there and read through a giant book of rules) but I do mind the competition part of it. I guess I would have guessed that this society would be very competitive and be excited to play games that pit you against each other.

After having played these games while thinking about how the games work and how the players interact, it seems a bit more like since we ended up bonding over the game, maybe that does fit with the American standard of not playing complicated games or not playing them much because we tend, as a society, not to want to get involved with each other. Maybe being a gamer, at least identifying as a gamer, means that an individual is more open to going against that tendency in society and being more open as a person.

In spite of my lack of desire to compete, I do consider myself to be much more open and open minded than society's standard. So... I guess somehow that matches up with how things work, in spite of how I didn't see things that way before.

Brownie points to whoever know where my subject quote is from. ^_^

My analysis of Sid Sackson's seminal board game, Acquire, is posted on my blog here.

So yep, here it is, just as advertised.

Download file

The Loss of Self-Consciousness

Okay, it's been bugging me now. I don't think this little paragraph is true. The DDR picture is definitely what did it for me. I'm trying to think about how this is sort of right. Yeah, sometimes when you've done something well, you feel good and forget to be self conscious. But what happens when you don't do well? Or when someone tells you something that is hurtful? Don't you then proceed to play feeling bad about yourself? Or stop playing because you feel bad about yourself?

Isn't losing a gain of self-consciousness?

Probably more to follow.

For my first simple system analysis, I chose a set of curious cards entitled "What's My Story?" What manner of engrossing revelation followed? Consult the following PDF to find out!

Mike Sennott's Simple System Analysis

Linked is a pdf copy of my Kandinsky domino system analysis:

Download file

My reflections on Tracy Fullerton's d4, d6, d8, d10, d10 (percentile), d12 and d20: http://remotedevice.net/blog/polyhedral-dice/

I found the site (download the pdf) for the MDA Framework from Hunicke, LeBlanc, Zubec:

www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf

I've attached in my extended entry my actual analysis, but if nothing else, I'd like to suggest anybody and everybody who has any interest in, or has ever played with, a deck of Bicycle cards, go to their history of the company website here: http://www.bicyclecards.com/pages/company_history/8.php

I found myself fascinated and was sorry I couldn't just write all about how cool the history was. I would suggest having patience through the first two or three paragraphs about the original start to the company. After that, it becomes very much about the cards and their uses over time.

TreeHouse Simple System Analysis

Well, since everyone else is doing it... here's my analysis of legos as a system.

Here is my analysis of play money for all to enjoy.

So I was pretty sure I was supposed to post this assignment on my blog? Anyway, here it is, for people who are interested in learning all about the mysterious Rubik's Cube.

Download file

For our first _____________ assignment for Tracy Fullerton's Design for Interactivity class, we had to provide a simple analysis of a game system. To that end, you can now enjoy my analysis of Price Stern Sloan's popular and ____________ language game, Mad Libs!

To view, you can download a ___________ PDF version of the file here.

The most eye-catching aspect of the Pocket Etch-a-Sketch is its bright red front panel, replete with a rectangular viewing area and two white knobs in adjacent corners. The device gives the overall impression of a television set (or at least, a television from the days of the Etch-a-Sketch’s invention). The knobs cry out to be fiddled with, and the tiny icons above each knob—left- and right-facing triangles above the left knob, up- and down-facing triangles above the right knob—suggest the probable results of exploratory twisting.

In Monday's inaugural 541 course, we opened a market for skill exchange. Visual arts and computer programming seemed to be the skills in highest demand. As somebody who is interested in (among other things) the former and capable of providing the latter, I think it would be valuable to set up some extra-curricular workshops for us to teach each other in a group setting. This would be separate from the 541 class, and would involve no graded deliverable. Later on, these workshops could expand to include writing, music, or even group playthroughs of games.

In particular, I believe that by getting together a group of subject experts (artists or programmers) and a group of people who want to learn those subjects, we can bond more strongly as a class as well as pick up some new abilities. The rough outline I imagine for these workshops could be brief lectures to set the tone and establish techniques followed by a big block of time spent working, with the subject experts available for question and answer. This structure isn't set in stone; subject experts would obviously determine the flow of their workshop. When not working as a group, participants could be expected to practice on their own and bring in questions. For people who are "officially" teaching or learning these subjects, the workshops could also serve as valuable supplementary resources.

As for the scheduling, I think the ZML is the natural place for this if it's available; otherwise, we could work out a different location. Timing-wise, I think they could work very well one after another, perhaps twice a week; at the same time on alternating days could also be effective (e.g. art on Monday/Wednesday, programming on Tuesday/Thursday). We're fortunate in that our schedules are quite similar, so finding a good time slot shouldn't be too difficult.

So, if this idea is interesting to anyone, please leave a comment saying whether you'd like to give or receive instruction in either topic, and a suggestion for a time slot.