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Week 11

I finally finished my game. Introducing The Car Game.

The Car Game is a game that focuses on society's views of the automobile. Using a traditional top-down style, The Car Game replaces a game’s usual game objective with a shiny red sportscar, something society, and the player, regard highly. The player must avoid obstacles, in this case boring normal cars, on order to acquire the sportscars. The Car Game functions like just about any other basic top-down game, but uses its subject matter to critique and highlight a certain aspect of society. It highlights the fact that society values materialistic things like expensive cars, while shunning other objects that are viewed as lesser, like “normal” cars.

Cars seem to be a running theme across my work for this class, so it seemed like the logical topic to choose. I made the art in MS Paint (which is surprisingly good for making pixel art) and then dropped it into Scratch. By far my biggest issue was getting the Makey Makey to work. My plan was to use Hot Wheels cars for the input. The player is grounded and then touches each car as if it were a button. Logic would tell you metal Hot Wheels cars are conductive and would work just fine. Turns out they don’t work at all. I assumed it’s because the paint is too thick and electricity won’t pass through to the metal body. I had to last-second scramble to figure out a way to make it work and I think I’ve got it.

Basically I MacGuyvered a panel of buttons out of things I had laying around in my apartment. The Hot Wheels cars are sitting on spring made from a spiral notebook and there is a screw in the box contained within the spring. A piece of foil is on the bottom of the car and the Makey Makey grounded to the screw and wired to the spring. When a car is pressed down the spring/foil contacts the screw and closes a circuit, inputting a button press to the computer. It’s ugly and fragile, but it works well enough. I’m afraid it’l fall apart carrying it to the final, but I’ll bring extra supplies with me in case I need to do some last minute repairs.

I’d like to dedicate this project to my spanish notebook, who sacrificed its own life so that this project could see the light of day. Also, whoever formulated the paint Hot Wheels uses is my new worst enemy.

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Week 10

I’m probably 90% done with my game now. I still don’t have a firm grasp on what exactly the theme will be (and thus I haven’t created any art for the game yet), but I have the foundation for the game complete. I went through a number of ideas before settling on a top down game. The game has 5 areas with the player starting in the middle. The basic idea is you move a character around this world while avoiding walls or blocks (you lose a life if you touch them) and picking up a special object. Loosing 3 lives will result in a game over screen and acquiring 5 items will win. These numbers can be tweaked to alter the difficulty of the game, depending on the theme and Makey Makey input I choose to use.

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Week 9

This week we made a soldering badge and assembled some circuits. I have a tiny bit of experience soldering before. A year or two ago some wiring came loose in my old PS2 that needed to be resoldered. My grandpa is an expert in those sort of things so he gave me a brief lesson in how to solder and helped me fix it. The badge was a fun, if difficult, task. I certainly got more experience with soldering from it. The snap circuits were fun too. The more I think about it the more I believe I had the same or similar kit growing up. It’s good for getting a basic understanding of how circuits work (and for annoying other people). It was fun to mess around with.

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Week 8

Finally this class is getting interesting to me. Making a game sounds really fun and Scratch looks like a great way to quickly get a game up and running. I don’t really know what I’m going to do for my game yet, but I have a few ideas in my head. The Makey Makey sounds like a really cool tool and I’m excited to find ways to use it.

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Week 7

I realize I haven’t talked about the presentations yet. My presentation is going to be about cars. There are tons and tons of systems to talk about related to cars, so the major ones I will be talking about are:

- the manufacturing process

- how regulations effect car design

- effects of the car on society and the economy

- trends in styling

I’ll save most of the explaining for the paper, but I think cars play a massive role in the world today and most people don’t realize quite how important they are. Suburbs as we know them wouldn’t even exist without the invention of the automobile. I could ramble on for days about cars, but the gist is that they’re a pretty big deal.

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Week 6

So my final narrative website has been expanded a bit more. I wanted to add some more pages and expand the story line, so I added a choice to the beginning of the narrative, effectively doubling the options. Instead of simply choosing to wear a helmet or not, the person must budget their money more. An unexpected expense comes up, in this case a broken laptop, and the person must decide whether to spend the money or not, influencing outcomes down the road.

My website certainly isn’t the most visually appealing thing in the world. Most of my time was spent writing the HTML for the tons of web pages and then writing content for them. As I've mentioned before writing is terribly difficult for me and I didn’t expect it to take quite as long as it did. This meant that the CSS is pretty basic and there’s nothing flashy going on. The most complex thing I have is a button that changes color when you click it. Oh well, I still think it works well enough.

http://mysite.du.edu/~gleslie3/

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Week 5

So we’ve been working on our websites lately. I haven’t delved into the content very much yet so there isn’t much to show, but I have pages that nest and link to each other. That basically forms the framework for the website, so once I have that done filling it with content shouldn’t take very long.

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Week 4

So I’m not a huge fan of this narrative story idea. I’ve always been terrible at coming up with stories. I have a lot of technical skill, but not a lot of creativity, so this is difficult.

Currently my plan is as follows:

It begins with you preparing to go snowboarding (or skiing, I guess). You’re given the decision to wear a helmet or not. If you choose to wear a helmet you can choose to push yourself that day. If you do you fall but your helmet protects your head. You’re shaken, but fine. If you don’t you take it easy that day. Either way you have a good day. If you don’t wear a helmet you can also choose to push yourself that day. If you do you fall and suffer a concussion. Ski patrol is called, you’re taken to the hospital, etc. Bad day. If you chose not to push yourself you continue on and have a good day, but later on you (or a friend possibly?) fall and are injured anyway. Its something out of your control (another rider/skier crashes into you, etc.).

It’s maybe not the most elaborate plan, but recently a friend of mine was in Vail skiing with a former roommate and her roommate was hit by a snowboarder on the mountain. She was wearing a helmet, but still suffered a concussion and spent a night in the ER. Wearing a helmet is extremely important to me and I want people to understand why they should.

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Week 3

So these are my wireframes. Honestly I still don’t have a great grasp on how these work. The first one shows how different household items connect to the internet and the second one is how the internet works according to that video we watched.

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Net Art

https://anthology.rhizome.org/screenfull

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Week 2

My imaginary system went through a significant overhaul at the last second, so I figured I’d show the original version. In this one time travel is still the focus of the system, but the context is changed so that it showcases the interaction between interdimensional space gerbils and sentient Cheetos that produce electricity when affected by an outside force. I gave the gerbils as backstory and everything before I realized it was dumb and reworked it into something a bit more grounded in reality.

My original write up:

The gerbils use the Cheetos to play ping pong in order to harness the energy the Cheetos produce so that the gerbils can power their flux capacitor. In return, the Cheetos receive free healthcare from the gerbils to deal with the potentially debilitating injuries they may receive while providing ping pong power.

The ping pong paddles that the gerbils use has a device that captures the electric charge that in produce from the impact with the cheeto. This power is retained by the generator and sent to the flux capacitor. The flux capacitor is then used to control the time travel device. Meanwhile any potentially injured Cheetos can go and get treatment free of charge.

Gerbil Backstory

The year was 2003. The US Government had been conducting experiments on gerbils to test how they would handle travel through the time-space continuum. Unfortunately, something bad happened and the gerbils escaped. They activated the flux capacitor-powered time travel device and traveled to a universe where Cheetos provided power when hit with ping pong paddles. The gerbils needed a power source for their flux capacitors so they made an agreement with the Cheetos to provide them with free healthcare (something they perfected during their time-space travels) in return for their Cheeto power.