PP3 – Puzzle Game

For Pressure Project 3, I decided to create a game reminiscent of games like The Talos Principle and The Stanley Parable. These games are unique in that they explore themes of determinism and freewill, and the ending you receive is based on how you perform in light of the choices you make in the game. Certain choices made following the instruction of the narrator/narration will lead you to a somewhat lesser ending than one of disobedience and self-determination. The links below highlight the endings of the games where these themes are evident.

Talos Principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5FloMq9Lck
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mNa2csiD8E
Stanley Parable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3UxRa_-9UU

Given the time constraint, I decided to make a game with the puzzle goal of unlocking when the user successfully correlates actions, but only executes their own commands.

User Inputs would include a gamepad controller and a Kinect interface, and users would input a corresponding button on the controller or move in a corresponding way in space.
🡸 🡺 🡹 🡻 A (Jump) B (Crouch)

Participants would move in a grid space made up in Isadora with data from the Kinect to complete the physical inputs. In the first phase, only the game pad would be used. In the second, only physical movement. In the final phase, both would be used. Thematically, there would be psychology/philosophy quotes about choice between phases, some which would suggest a means of escape/winning. In the final phase, you would unlock the real ending if you made valid unprompted choices.

The game wasn’t completed because I lost the save at one point when I was trying to get the Kinect stream working. SAVE EARLY, SAVE OFTEN. At time of performance, game included the first phase only. It also broke.

Here’s a user actor example on how to make a non-repeating random number string generator. Change length or modulo number for different results. This was used to generate the pattern of inputs that the user had to input.

PP2 – Fortune Teller

My project was to make a fortune telling interface, styled as the Greek/Roman Oracle of Delphi. In its operation it was to detect the input of the user through text or audio, determine what what said, and meaningfully respond to the contextual and emotional charge of the user dialog. I was very much unable to finish, and I think this is as a result of trying too many foreign concepts in this project combined with a 9 hour time limit.

Did start a good discussion in class regarding AI/machine generated response. Due to the nature of the application, it leads to an ethical discussion on how or in what ways we should be (or not at all be) manipulating the experience/emotional states of the participant.

Although, I am familiar with all of the technology and techniques in my plan for the project, I have never directly implemented a few like: language processing, Audio binary, TCP/IP requests (I recommend NEVER doing this by hand, use a wrapper class), Google Cloud, etc. Led me to think about the ways in which I consider what skills I do and do not have a mastery of, and how to construct this knowledge of each into a full project. For instance, I would definitely consider some of the aspects of this project to be outside my comfort zone now. Ideally for a new project, I should be using skills I already have, save for 1 or 2 new concepts only.

Google CPS: https://cloud.google.com/docs/overview/cloud-platform-services
Chatbot Applications: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/10/04/chatbots
Historical Inspiration for Styling: https://www.coastal.edu/intranet/ashes2art/delphi2/misc-essays/oracle_of_delphi.html

Pressure Project 3

For Pressure Project 3 I decided to bring in some of my childhood enjoyments to this project. Knowing that I had to have a project that did not involve the keyboard yet had some level of technology involved I had to figure out what to do. I remember enjoying decoding things and figuring out puzzles. The technology that was involved was the Makey Makey and using a website called Scratch. The experience was where someone was to receive a piece of paper. On the paper you had four pictures with a piece of duct tape on top and three dashes below the pictures. There were two tables. One table had a group of red cups that were turned over. The other table had a computer and a Ritz cracker box with silver items protruding up from the inside of the box. When someone received their paper, they were to use the color of the duct tape at the top of the paper to correspond with the color duct tape on the cup that had a letter written on it. Then using those cups, they then had it narrowed down to a smaller number of letter choices. Then looking at the pictures they had to figure out the word and the three dashes let them know that it was a three-letter word. Once they figured out the word they were to figure out that you had to turn the cup right side up to reveal a number inside the cup. Then using the numbers, they were to go to the computer and Ritz box. On the Ritz box there were ten silver protruding sets of foil. There were three rows of three foils and one foil in the center bottom that had the message hold me written around it. The experiencer then was to hold the tenth foil and then touch the other ones in order of the numbers. Once the code was cracked they heard a cheering noise from the computer. There was also a message for the user to click the green flag when they heard their noise.

It seemed that everyone was enjoying the experience. One person said they enjoyed the tactile experience of the this project. It became one big group event and they even asked for more clues when they finished one. They eventually tried to find how to break the experience or to find out if there were any underlying similarities from the clues. They eventually found out that to make the cheering sound you had to hold the one silver prong and enter two numbers followed by the nine. If I was to do this again, I would work more triggers to where there were different sounds for series of numbers and for every last digit that was different, there was a different sound or a random sound.

As I was trying to determine how to put together this pressure project I did some research into other ideas. I ran across a video on how to use the Makey Makey and a book about different projects called 20 Makey Makey Projects for the Evil Genius. There are a lot of projects in the book that I would like to make happen yet I needed to narrow down to this specific project. The project I used was the lock box project. I did some tweaking from what the book has to make it my own. Overall, I feel that this was a successful project.

Pressure Project 3

For this project, I really enjoyed the class’ take on a fortune teller in the last pressure project, and a few people’s reminded me of the old chose your own adventure books I used to read when I was younger. One thing I remember is being able to skip ahead a lot and would avoid pages if I saw them while turning through, so I wanted to make something like that but where you couldn’t cheat. I thought that QR codes would be an interesting idea to tell this story, so I wrote out a whole choose your own adventure centered around a murder mystery. From each segment that went on each page, it ended up being a unique QR code that the user can scan to read that section of the story. I pasted the corresponding QR codes to their respective pages on a book that I had. To generate the Qr codes, I just pasted text into (@Laura) this website which generated the corresponding png.

Watching the class interact with my project was so much fun because everyone was very divided on which path to take and it ultimately lead to a democratic vote to which path to take. I think it really helped that the narrator was Alex for this story, his narration really gave life to my adventure. I just wish that my speaker was working; I wanted to have some background music for ambiance.

If you’d like to go through the story in segments, use the attached zip file to read the story using the QR codes. If you’d like to just read it straight up, use the script.md file attached.

script.md

qr_codes

playlist