(PP3) Mystery Box Game Instructions and Reflection

Posted: October 15, 2020 | Author: Kenny Olson | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

By Kenny Olson

objective:

You are the white cube (bottom left corner). Shift and dodge away from the color changing bad guy (top right corner), who is protecting the color changing rainbow gold. You have three lives to collect as much rainbow gold as possible. As you steal more and more rainbow gold the bad guy will get more and more upset. The bad guy will do whatever it takes to protect and hide the rainbow gold. How much gold can you steal, and how long can you last!?!?!

Instructions:

Plug the “Mystery Box” (Makey Makey) into the computer. Plug the Leap Motion into the computer. At this time do not touch the box until the “game starts” (If you don’t have the “leap motion” or the “Mystery Box”, the game can still be played, and you may skip this first step.)
Download and open the Mystery Box zip file and open the Isadora File found within. Then immediately open the Isadora preview window full screen. hot key: (command + sift + S)
A pink and blue loading bar will appear, the game is loading, wait till loading bar fills and the main title will appear.
The main title will play music (adjust volume accordingly). Text will then flash saying “swipe hand to start” (swipe hand over the leap motion) to start playing. (If you don’t have the leap motion you may press the space bar or the zero key on the keyboard.)
The main title and music will fade away and the game will start.
To play the game. Pick up the “Mystery Box” and try touching random sides of the box together with your hands to move the white cube (found in the bottom corner at the start of the game). (The keyboard may also be used to move the white box around by using the arrow keys.) The smaller blinking box is the “rainbow gold” (meant to be collected). The colored box moving towards the white box (found in the top right corner at the start of the game) is the “bad guy” (say away form it).
When you loose all three of your lives the game will end and present your final score. You will then be redirected to the main title screen. (jump back to step four.)

NOTE:

To achieve the best playing experience adjust your Isadora screen preview window ratio to 1920 by 1080.

Game Download:

Mystery-Box Download

Reflection:

I started this project in hopes to make a NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) look alike game, with an 80s/90s retro vibe. I referenced a lot of game systems to understand what kids of game I wanted to make. Gauntlet was one game that stood out the most. Gauntlet is a top down, roguelike, dungeon crawl type game. The game itself is never ending, however, gets progressively harder the farther the players get into the game. In the game players collect gold, potions, and food while trying to find the exit to the next level. While doing so there are different types of non playable “bad guys” who try to kill or harm the “good guys”.

In my game I wanted to try and recreate as much of the Gauntlet game system as I could. After talking with Alex I quickly understood how to allow players to control a characters movement around the screen. Alex said to think of the playing area like a grid and the character is jumping/moving from grid box to grid box. to get the character to move I used keyboard watcher actor (tied to the arrow keys) triggering a counter actor. The counter actor incrementally increased and decreased the horizontal and vertical values of the character (which in my game was a colored square made from a shapes actor) so when the arrow keys were pressed the character could move. For the bad guy I used the same system as for the good guy, however, the bad guy needs to both move on its own and chase/follow the good guy. I did this with a comparator actor, I took the horizontal and vertical values of the good guy and the horizontal and vertical values of the bad guy and fed both the horizontal values into one comparator actor and both vertical values into their own comparator actor. I then set each comparator actor to trigger the bad guy to move if the bad guys horizontal and vertical values are not equal to the good guys values. Not included in the Gauntlet game was a life counter/display. In the game I made, I gave the player three lives/chances to be killed before the game would reset from the start. Inside Isadora the code looks more complicated than what is happening. Basically, what is happening is if the horizontal and vertical values from the good and bad guy are the same, one of the three shapes actors (displayed in the top left of the active game window at the start of each game signifying three lives) is turned off. After this event happens a third time, a jump actor is triggered and sends the player to a “GAME OVER SCREEN” with the players score displayed, then sending the player back to the title screen. The game then resets. In Gauntlet, players collect items in the game (like gold and food) and exit each level by standing over an exit door. In my game, A character is tasked with collecting a small flashing cube (I called rainbow gold, because it changes colors) the when the character lands on a rainbow gold square several things happen. First, the players score increases by “100”. Two, the stage, obstacles, the bad guy, and the rainbow gold all changes colors (signifying a change in level). Third, the rainbow gold “randomly” changes its position to a new spot in the playing. As the player accumulates points by collecting “rainbow gold” the score increases and when the score increases several things happen. First, for every 1,000 points added to the score the bad guy moves faster (up until 10,000 points). Second, As the score gets higher several different sized squares appear over the playing area, and block the players view. The game still functions as usual, however, when the rainbow gold appears behind the “view blocking” square area, the player needs to then search with these areas to find the gold. When the bad guy or good guy enter these areas they also become obscured from view. This adds a much needed tension and strategie to the game play.

The most challenging aspect of this game to create was the character movement system (as explained prior). The system I created worked great (after exploring and testing several different systems before), however, the system I ended with could not function with negative numbers. This meant I had to manually shift the origin of the projector actor from the center of the preview screen, to the bottom left corner of the preview screen. (As shown below) the origin is the (0,0) usually found in the center of a projector actor preview window in Isadora. To insure all the characters would always land on a set of positive coordinates I had to physically zoom into the top right area of the screen . By doing this I ran into some scaling problems and gained some granularity with the objects that needed to interact with the grid (so the good guy and bad guy square shapes actors, the rainbow gold square shapes actor, the grid image I used in the background, and the view obscuring squares also made from the shapes actor). I overcame the fuzzy and granular look by adding more noise grain to the overall composition to help unify and make everything feel purposeful.

Origin in Math: Definition & Overview | Study.com

In the end the overall game works great, but there are some small glitches that happen from time to time. One glitch is the game will start the player off with two lives instead of three, even though the three squares (representing the player having three lives) in the top left of the screen are visible, under the hood, the code shows the player has already lost a life. Another glitch is sometimes the bad guy could take a life away from the good guy by only being on one of the same horizontal or vertical access as the good guy, this would also cause the bad guy to move around the screen in an odd way. Most of the glitches happen after the game ends (for whatever reason) the game does not fully reset when a new game starts.

If I were to continue with this game I would like to add more bad guys over time, a way for the player to gain an extra life, possibly grow and shrink the playing grid area, A scoreboard with player names. I also think adding a character selection screen would be interesting, the player could choose between different shapes to play as, and each shape has different abilities.

Using Isadora as a video game development software for RPGs is probably not something the developers meant for Isadora to be used as, and it shows. Regardless this was A fun experiment.

Tara Burns – PP2

Posted: October 6, 2020 | Author: Tara | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

Goal:
– To create a sound response to movement/dance
– To test the recording of sound from VR/Tilt Brush brushes for repurposing in Isadora

Challenges:
– Having the wire to ground attached to my body made it precarious and possibly dangerous for extended use.
– This would require A LOT of wire.
– The VR/Tilt Brush sounds recorded pretty soft.

Conclusions and future thoughts:
This project kind of turned into dance dance revolution. However, the help from the class/Alex to make a grounding agent for each pad (provided there is enough wire) would make it so I didn’t have to wear the grounding cable. For future application, I can imagine this controlling light and sound perhaps in a small box like a telephone booth (post-covid), that when touched the sounds rolled over one another. As it is, without the numbers, the sounds roll over each other and you can’t quite place what is happening and if in an installation or performance this is what I would prefer. However, the wires and connection to the Makey Makey don’t seem like they would stand up to the abuse I would require (as a dancer), so if everything was contained in a box, then it would probably be ok. In addition, the sounds in Tilt Brush get louder the faster you move, so this could be an interesting thing to try to add to the patch.

This is the whole patch. I used the same actor components for each sound. A keyboard watcher –> Counter –> Comparator –> Toggle –> Movie Player (there was also a projection of what I created in Tilt Brush, but it was only to create the sound) –> Projector

I also added a verbal counting method because I think that was part of the brief, but I didn’t show this in class because the counters actually overpowered the “music” of the sounds so all you heard were random numbers. However, it was interesting to hear what number was being triggered.

These pictures are basically just reiterations with a different sound and then a different number of Speak Text actors to denote which number the computer would say.
This addition included Timecode Calculator –> Text Comparator –> Speak Text actors.

This is more of the same, but just different counts and different sounds in the movie player.

Pressure Project 2 – Kenny Olson

Posted: October 3, 2020 | Author: Kenny Olson | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

For project 2, I made a Randomized Nicki Minaj Meme Generator Hydration Station System. The system set up is: a water glass reseting on a metal tray, and when the glass is picked up off the try, a random Nicki Minaj Meme audio clip is played. The mechanics of the system involve a Makey Makey. With one set of alligator clips connected to the metal try and the earth (or grounding) connection on the Makey Makey (the green wire shown below). With another alligator clip, one end is connected to the space button on the Makey Makey with the other alligator clip end taped to a water glass (the yellow wire shown below) with a metal conduction string in the alligator clips mouth. The sting goes under the glass and is secured on the adjacent side with more tape. When the water glass is placed on the metal tray, the string on the bottom of the glass makes contact with the tray, sending a signal to the Makey Makey telling it to trigger the space bar.

Inside of Isadora, a “keyboard watcher actor” (with direction set to: UP) triggers an “envelop generator++ actor” with a one second rate with a starting rate of 0 and an ending rate of 100. When the “envelop generator++ actor” ends, the end trigger goes in two directions. Direction one triggers and displays a number, counting the times the system is triggered. The second direction triggers a random audio sound from a preselected list of ten sound. Direction one works by, the “ADD” on a “counter actor” with a min value of 1 and max value of 101, and mode set to wrap. The output number is then fed into the line “Text/ure actor”. The text document connected to the “Text/ure actor” (accessible when the actor is double clicked) has a list of numbers from 0-100 displayed vertically. Finally the video out of the “Text/ure actor” is fed into a “projector actor”. Direction two works by, the “envelop generator++ actor” triggering a “random actor” the “random actor” produces a random rational number between the values of 1 and 100. The value from the “random actor” is then fed into a “float to integer actor” to get a natural number. This number is then sent to ten deferent “inside range actors”. each “inside range actors” is set to only trigger if the number given is between the predetermined values. Each of the ten “inside range actors” are set incumbently to only accept 10 numbers. So the first “inside range actors” only accepts numbers “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10” and the next “inside range actors” only accepts numbers ” 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20″ so on and so forth until 100. Next each of the “inside range actors” is fed to its own “envelop generator++” from the “inside range actors” enter to the “envelop generator++” trigger. The “envelop generator++” output is then connected to the play length of a “movie player actor”. The result is, when the “random number actor” is triggered, and formatted correctly, each “inside range actors” will read said number and determine whether or not trigger the “envelop generator++” to then play the audio.

In the end, the system will run something like this: a person picks up the water glass from the tray, with a one second delay, a random audio sound will play (in my case a Nicki Minaj meme), and a number will be displayed, counting the number of times the glass is lifted or “drank from”.

Reflections:

Originally I wanted a sound to play after I opened my desk drawer and also count the times said door was opened, however, I found trying to make a button with the Makey Makey difficult with the limited arts and crafts tools I have. Inside of Isadora, Changing the direction of the “keyboard watcher” from down to up was a crucial and important revelation. Also, finding a way to visualize the automated counting system was the hardest part of this project. Once I found the “Text/ure actor” everything became much smoother.

Crutique:

During the critique, an interesting discussion about culture came about. “what if instead of a meme sound played, a video of someone needing water was projected, when someone picked up the water glass?” in the right setting or context a simple gesture with relatively simple tech could have astronomical cassations and implications.

Pressure Project 2

Posted: October 1, 2020 | Author: Matt Cantelon | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

For this project, I wanted to use the makey-makey in order to trigger photos from a webcam to be taken. After a certain number of photos were taken, I wanted them to be displayed on a computer monitor.

I glued a couple of pieces of foil to a piece of cardboard and put a cloth mat over it and ran wires back to the makey makey in order to trigger a space bar press. One of my initial issues was the taking of several photos very quickly when the makey makey was pressed. I used an envelope generator between the keyboard watcher and the capture stage to picture actor in order to make it so one photo at a time was taken.

The next challenge was recalling the file names that had not been created yet. I discovered Isadora did not like referencing files which did not yet exist, so I needed to load in the values after the pictures were taken.

I built a user actor to display each image in a random way and nested it inside of another user actor.

Inside of this actor, I used random value actors in order to randomly generate where the image would appear on the screen. The images would then fly over to the opposite side of the screen.

Ultimately I feel this project gave me a good grasp of manipulating a photo library in Isadora as well as a more sophisticated understanding of some of the logic and math functions.

Pressure Project 2

Posted: October 1, 2020 | Author: Kara Komarnitsky | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

I learned from the last project and started with a written brainstorm of ideas before doing any actual work on this. Then I narrowed it down to what I actually wanted and drew a design, specified my goals, and the basic logic of the program. I decided to create a Spontaneous Dance Party Machine for my staircase. The goal was to randomly surprise someone coming down the stairs with an experience that would inspire them to dance and be in the moment. So while they might have been on their way to get food before trudging back up the stairs for more hours of Zoom, this gives them a chance to let loose for a minute of their day.

The resources I used for this were the Makey-Makey attached to aluminum for the trigger. I designed the aluminum on the staircase to be triggered by the normal way that someone might put their hand on the railing when descending.

The wire attached to the left side of this went to the “a/<–” on the Makey-Makey while the right side went to the ground. Someone’s hand would then connect the two sides.

Then the Makey-Makey plugged into my computer which ran the Isadora program.

Had to keep in mind a power source for my computer.

Then I had to get the stage from Isadora into my projector. I did not have the right kind of cable to plug the projector directly into my computer but it would plug into my phone. So I used an app called ApowerMirror which was installed on both my phone and computer in order to mirror my computer screen onto my phone. This allowed me to transfer what was on my full screen stage on my computer into the projector that would serenade the person who triggered the stairs.

Angles projector to where someone would be coming down the stairs.

I used two scenes to manage this experience. The first one counted the triggers as well as determining how many times someone had to trigger the stairs before the projection and music would start. It randomly generated a new number from 5-10 for each round.

Isadora patch that counted triggers and managed the serenade.

It would then activate the next scene which contained a colorful projection and started a random fun song to dance to. After one minute the scene would be slowly deactivated.

Projection that would spotlight the person who came down the stairs.

Overall I was really satisfied with this project. It took me a lot less time than the previous one I think because I took the time to plan at the beginning. It was also super fun to leave up in my house and spontaneously be able to jam out to a good song!

A few things to note for the future would be 1) I couldn’t projection map because I was just mirroring my computer screen; 2) my phone battery was used up very quickly my mirroring and projecting. So I would want to look for an app that could act as a second monitor or even better, get an HDMI to USB-A cord that would connect my projector directly to my computer.

Tara Burns – The Pressure is on (PP1)

Posted: September 11, 2020 | Author: Tara | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

Goals:
To use the Live Drawing actor
To deepen my understanding of user actors and macros.

Challenges:
Finessing transitions between patches
Occasional re-setting glitches (it sometimes has a different outcome than the first 10x)
Making things random in the way you want them to be random is difficult.

User Actor creates daisy chains to help “cars” enter, dance, and exit. I changed the last User Actor into a User Actor Macro so I could change the outputs, stop the lost “car” and terminate him. 🙁 I’m realizing at this moment, that I took a picture before I changed the rectangles to circles, but I like the rectangles better I think.

This is after the termination of said car. 🙁

When the explosion is complete it triggers the pulse generators and envelope generators (EG) to begin the timing, color change, and brightness change of the “crazy” line drawing.

After 15 seconds the envelop generator completes and triggers another EG to raise the intensity of the projector that the more gouache paint fills in the frame until I press ‘a’ on the keyboard to exit the scene.

Pressure Project 1

Posted: September 10, 2020 | Author: Meghan Stanford | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

For Pressure Project 1 I created a narrative of a ship crashing on an island. A person is stranded and is eventually saved by a plane. I achieved this by using multiple shapes to create the different animations and envelope generators to move them across the screen. I also created a rain effect that slowly grew in intensity.

This project was a fun challenge. In trying to find a way to keep the audience guessing at what is going to happen next, I thought telling a story would be the best way. This wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.

I ran into a few problems with layering of shapes/colors and keeping shapes together in a group as they moved across the screen. In the future, I would create virtual stages and create compositions that way first then manipulate the boat.

The boat travels across from right to left.

The boat travels across a second time, but this time it collides with an island.

Pressure Project 1

Posted: September 10, 2020 | Author: Kenny Olson | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

Kenny Olson

This video was what I used as inspiration for this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVkdfJ9PkRQ

I wanted to create a looping and evolving “vaporwave aesthetic” visualization in Isadora. I found a video (linked above) of different length pendulums swinging and I wanted to try and recreate it. Once the Math was figured out the overall pattern was very simple. I added A black frame and a grid for aesthetic purposes (the ‘Nodes’ pictured above). The main chunk of the magic lives inside of the ‘User Actors’.

Inside each ‘User Actor’ Is a ‘Wave Generator’ feeding into the ‘Hue’ of a ‘Colorize Node’ (the min and max of the ‘Colorize Hue’ are min:80 max:95) and the ‘horizontal position’ of the ‘Shapes Node’. The ‘Shape Node’ ‘scale value’ is 10. Then the ‘Shapes Node’ ‘video out’ feeds into the ‘Colorize Node’ ‘texture in’. Next the ‘Colorize Node’ goes into the ‘texture in’ of a ‘shift Glitch Node’ (this is for looks and adds a fun glitching effect). I should also note the values of: ‘frequency’, ‘vertical’, ‘horizontal’, and ‘size’ on the ‘Shift Glitch Node’ are all set at 1. Then the ‘texture out’ of the ‘Shift Glitch’ goes into the ‘video in’ of a ‘Motion Blur Node’ with ‘accumulation amount’ set to 100 and ‘decay amount’ set to 70. Next the ‘video out’ of the Motion Blur Node’ goes into the ‘video’ of a ‘Projector Node’. Finally I added a ‘User Input Node’ into the ‘vertical position’ of the ‘Shapes Node’ and another ‘User Input’ into the ‘frequency’ of the ‘Wave Generator Node’. When completed the result should look like something similar to the above image. (you can now ‘save and update all’ and leave the ‘User Actor Window’ )

Now this is when the Fun starts. Back in the main composition window of Isadora you should have a newly created ‘User Actor’ with 2 adjustable values (‘frequency’ and ‘vertical position’). To get started adjust the ‘frequency’ to 0.28 Hz and the ‘vertical position’ to 45. You can then duplicate the ‘User Actor’ as many times as you please. The trick is to subtract 0.01Hz from the ‘frequency’ and subtract 5 from the ‘vertical position’ in a descending pattern with every additional ‘User Actor’ (My 1st ‘User Actor’ starts with a ‘frequency’ of 0.28 Hz and a ‘vertical position’ of 45 ending with my 19th ‘User Actor’ with a ‘frequency’ of 0.1 Hz and a ‘vertical position’ of -45)

To reset the program simply reenter the current scene from a previous scene (with a “Keyboard Watcher Node” and a “Jump++ Node” or by using the ‘space bar’)

I should also note: as long as all the ‘User Actors’ are separated by a constant ‘frequency’ and ‘vertical position’ (or ‘horizontal position’) value from each other (in either a positive or negative direction) the pattern will continue on forever in said direction.

A fun thing about creating this mathematical visualization digitally is there is no friction involved (as shown in the video example, eventually the balls will stop swinging) meaning this pattern will repeat and never stop until Isadora is closed.

Pressure Project #1

Posted: September 10, 2020 | Author: Matt Cantelon | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

Working on this project, I wanted to play around with scenes as well as find a way to incorporate some randomly generated elements. I knew that I wanted to get away from a black background, so I found an image with several different colored blocks and zoomed in on it and then set it to move around the screen as a background.

I originally thought my project would consist of rectangular shapes, so I generated one to move in the layer above the background. However, then I started to think about drawing lines in front of the moving block. My first idea was to see if it would be possible to record a mouse movement and then play it back inside of the mouse watcher. After a little playing, I used a random actor to generate lines. This led me to the idea of more and more lines being generated before the project loops back to the beginning.

I began to explore ways of going to different scenes so that the lines would begin to draw on top of each other. As we discussed in class, I could have accomplished this more efficiently by using the jump actor.

One of the best parts about this project to me was seeing different ways people laid out their workspace as well as getting ideas for new actors. Through this project I feel much more confident about basic kinds of actors as well as working with scenes.

Link to Isadora file:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ai2N4YhYaKTvgY9sbl-j6aDoPcdJMg?e=9McCvN

Pressure Project One

Posted: September 10, 2020 | Author: Emily Pickens | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Pressure Project One | Leave a comment »

In this Pressure Project, while learning more of how the Isadora Program works, I was exploring chaos and randomness, and how to continually bring something new on screen before something would fully repeat itself. I went through and created figures that zoomed across the screen, that consistently changed in color, size, and shape. I wanted bursts of shapes that were stationary in their horizontal and vertical positions, but also rotated in order to keep the mind focused in different places. Overall, I learned much of how the program worked, and made some fun chaos in the process.