Cycle 1: Blinking Arrows

Going into Cycle 1, I knew that I wanted to make a game of some kind and I knew I wanted to use an alternative control scheme of some kind using the Makey Makey. I was also drawing inspiration from retro games, like Snake and Simon/Simon Says. Aside from this, I didn’t have any idea of what I wanted my final project to look like, so I decided to treat Cycle 1 as a pressure project, in that I would play around with Isadora and my ideas so far, and whatever came from it is what I’d demo for class.

My first step was just figuring out what exactly I wanted my project to look like at the end of Cycle 3, so I decided to just look at some retro games that I could potentially recreate in Isadora within the scope of the class. This research brought me to Dance Dance Revolution (not quite retro but close enough) and the idea of a rhythm game, the mechanics of which felt simple enough to produce before the end of the semester.

I started my patch with a rectangle in each corner of the stage, each labeled with a direction (up, down, left right). I would be using the Makey Makey as my controller (I will decide the actual controls in a later cycle), but these would correspond to the temporary keyboard input for each rectangles action. The rectangle UI didn’t feel very intuitive to me, and I didn’t like how it looked, so I scrapped those and changed them to arrows. At this point, I moved towards creating the game mechanics, starting with getting the arrows to blink based on the input of the user. Below is a picture of the patch for just one of the arrows to demonstrate how I got this to work.

During the in-class demo, I mentioned wanting to use a source of input that would be simple enough that a baby could use it, drawing inspiration from my baby nephew. Someone suggested I use a children’s xylophone as my controller and I really liked the idea, so I will be exploring children’s toys as input methods, most likely in Cycle 3. For Cycle 2, I will me continuing to work on the mechanics of my game.