PP2
Posted: September 28, 2018 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Task: For our second pressure project, we were tasked with creating a Fortune Teller Machine. I found this task to be interesting and just the right thing to help me focus on learning and exploring a few tools I might use in my thesis. In particular, this project allowed me to explore the abilities of FUNGUS which is a Unity Plugin that is used to help organize branching narratives.
Process: I first started with looking a little deeper into the task. From my last project, I didn’t want to have this system to have an “on the nose” quality. Therefore, I decided to go with Spirit Animals. The Animals have a fortune so to speak, but also, in the context of a vessel that predicts your future, they have a more personal connection. Your animal is the path.
I started with 10 animals, but ultimately settled on 6 animals and created a tree diagram. I started with the animals at the bottom. I knew I have to have the user select objects and the best representations I have given the tie constraints came from a model library from Google. From this library, I extracted a 2D image/ sprite and used that as the “items that one would choose in order to proceed along their chosen path. The items consisted of hats, shoes, and even some places like the sky.
Creating branches, laying down some music and making a few background changes lead me to a completed project.
Feedback: Most of the feedback was positive. The audience seemed to really like the ability to identify with a certain animal. It is something I hope to implement in future work. It really helped to give them a sense of uniqueness even though the choice was one of six.
One thing I might have done differently or didn’t expect was the very first user was interested in pressing the button as fast as they could. In the future, I suppose I should put some time gates even though that limits some of the freedom… Not sure. I suppose we are conditioned to play video games, or click on things with a mindless rapid succession. We might need to have the creators force individuals to pause in certain situations to actually observe the attention of the author.
