Pressure Project 2: Unveil the Mystery
Posted: March 3, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For this pressure project, we had to unveil a mystery. Going into it, I had a general idea of what I wanted to create, but I faced many struggles during execution. I spent a good portion of my 7 hours doing research into different actors I would need and how to use them. I think I got so focused on the technical aspects that I pushed the storytelling aspect to the side and didn’t flush the story out as much as I wanted. Overall, though, my project was successful and I learned a lot.
I wanted to hide little mini mysteries throughout my project, so I built three scenes for the user to explore before getting to the end. Each scene has a base set of actors that I build on to customize the scene. I created a little avatar to move around the stage with a Mouse Watcher actor and added a sound effect (unique to each scene) that played when the avatar hit the edge of the stage. The avatar also completed a different action in each scene when the user hit a button on the Makey Makey interface I made.
This is the Makey-Makey interface I made for myself, which allowed me to use it single-handed. I planned to make another one that was more like a video game controller but ran out of time.
In the intro scene, a digital city, the avatar jumped when the key was hit, and after 7 jumps, it inflated to take up a large portion of the scene, then quickly deflated. In the ocean scene, it triggered fish to “swim” across the scene so it could swim with the fish. In the space scene, the avatar teleported (an explosion actor was triggered to scatter the avatar’s pixels and reform them). Every scene had another key plugged into a counter actor, and after that key was pushed so many times, it jumped to the next scene. This project was designed to make the users curious to push all the buttons to figure out the mystery. A great suggestion I received was to put a question mark on the action button, which my peers agreed would be more effective than having it unlabeled.
I received a lot of positive feedback on my project, both verbally and through reactions. There were several moments where they were surprised by something that happened (aka a feature they unlocked), namely when the avatar first exploded in the space scene. I was surprised by this because I didn’t think it would be a big moment, but everyone enjoyed it. They went into it with an unlock-the-mystery mentality and were searching for things (oftentimes things that weren’t there), so they were happy to find the little features I put in for them to find before reaching the final mystery, which was that they won a vacation sweepstakes. They said the scenes felt immersive and alive because I used video for the backgrounds. Again, the space scene was a big hit because the stars were moving towards the user and was more noticeable than the more subtle movement of the ocean scene. There were multiple moments of laughter and surprise during the presentation so I am very pleased with my project.
The main critique was that the mystery was a bit confusing without context, and I do agree with that. One suggestion was to add a little something pointing to the idea of a context or raffle to add context for the final mystery, and another was to progress from the ocean to land to beach to get to the vacation resort or something along those lines. My original idea was to have portals between scenes and end with a peaceful beach vacation after traveling so far, but I ran out of time and didn’t dedicate enough time to telling the story that I ended up throwing something in at the end. They did say the final scene provided closure because the avatar had a smile (unique to this scene) and was jumping up and down in celebration.
I hit a creative rut during this project so the majority of it was improvised, contributing to the storytelling problem. I started by just making the avatar in the virtual stage because making a lil guy seemed manageable, and it sparked some ideas. I decided on a video game-esque project where the avatar would move around the scene. As I brainstormed ideas and started researching, I had a list of ideas for what could happen as the user navigated through my little world. I spent about 20-25 minutes on each idea on the list to figure out what worked. This involved research and (attempted) application. Some things didn’t work and I moved on to try other things.
I broke this project up into several short sessions to make it more manageable, especially with my creative struggles. This gave me time to sit and process/reflect what I had already done, attempted, and wanted to do. I was able to figure out a few mechanisms I had struggled with and go back later to make them work, which helped me move the project along. One time-based challenge I did not consider was how much time it would take to find images, videos, and sound effects. The idea to add these sonic and visual elements occurred much later in the process, so I did not have a lot of time left to adequately reallocate my time, so I do think I would have been better off creating a storyboard before diving right in to better prepare myself for the project as a whole.