#ctect503signal- Final Entry- Aurelia Debae-Â Par-ticipation
This semester project I have learnt a valuable lesson on how to work with people who are great students. When we started this project, we got approached by Ricardo who said, âSometimes the worst teams are made of those who are the best students.â This of course worried me at first, but I didnât believe it to be true. As our group began to brainstorm on ideas for what concept we want to follow and develop, I started to notice what Ricardo said and how it was becoming true. The issue we had was we all had really strong ideas and wanted to follow them through to see what we hoped we could create. This issue with this is that we couldnât decide on an idea as everyone wanted to do theirs or no one wanted to upset anyone else. This caused us to remain within the brainstorming section of our project too long, causing stress to add to the tension and difference within the group. As it did take so long, everyoneâs ideas where taken on board and were thought about. Once we were able to come up with a concept, group work and ethics improved as we were able to divide off into our own aspects of the project to focus on. At this stage, we began to work well together as a team, providing feedback and comments on each otherâs work and helping to boost the workload output. What I have taken away from this project is how to compromise on my own ideas to help build the teams ideas together. Â
My first blog, I explored all the possibilities that I could have chosen to expand on for the final project. Even though I became interested in personal identity and extension of humans through technology (in one of my later blogs) I was still able to create an impact on people and make them reflect on themselves as a human and how they live out their days in this technology rich world. Final Studio- Signal 18th of September
In my second blog, I highlighted the quick progress we already made on our project. It was really good to get started ahead of time, but we did get stuck in the brainstorming stage for too long. Even so, it helped us to develop our concept to another level. Blown up brainstorm
In my third blog, I talked about the issues we were going through regarding picking a concept to base our project on. We were also able to come up with a brief which lead us in the direction to developing our concept further towards digital and physical stimulation.The past two blogs taught me the importance of brainstorming and how its important to think something through before you rush into creating something. Reflection of Week 9Â
In my fourth blog, we started looking into what game we could recreate to display both digital and physical stimulation. We decided to chance the focus to the extremes of both, through social stimulation of both. Figuring it outÂ
In my fifth blog, we started to explore prototype possibilities, researching games that would be able to show the differences social stimulation between digital and physical games. Start of week 10
In my sixth blog, I started looking into the design aspects of our project. As at this point we had decided on creating a mini golf game, I started to search up design layouts and aesthetics around the game. This taught me the importance of having a good setup area. If it isnât designed well people wonât be interested in interacting with our project and wonât be able to learn about social stimulation through a digital and physical game play. Aesthetics
In my seventh blog, I re-blogged Jackâs blog for the images on the course design and progress we made that day. The visuals and mock up designs that Jack created helped us to begin to visualise what the physical product would like, helping us gather materials, measurements and give us an understanding of what it will look like as a final. This was important for moving forward as we could begin to set in place a scoring system and helped us for when we needed to build the course. Visuals are getting good
In my eighth blog, we started to split off and take care of our own tasks. I split off with Jake at this point and worked on research. This was very important for our project as it will allow the audience to get a better understand behind our project, allowing them to become self-aware of social stimulation that surrounds them everyday, even outside of physical and digital gaming. Recap of week 10
In my ninth blog, we sorted out the building progress on the course, user testing building the unity games and deciding on the location of our project.this was important stage in developing our project as we were able to expand on the physical course stimulation. We came up with the
 idea to make the pieces in the course to be movable, so that players can build their own course. This added to the physical social stimulation side of our project as players can collaborate with friends and family to build it for each other. Whereas, with the digital game they only had a few possible courses to select from, making the possibilities of difficultly has been chosen for them. This really helped to strengthen our project, making the tow sides of the game even more extreme to one another. Week 11 Recap
In my tenth blog, we started to put the frame of the mini golf course together. I also began to work on creating the poster and focusing on the layout design for the research. I found this to be an important part of the project as it will draw attention to our project, bringing more people over and being able to learn about the social stimulation that surrounds people in their everyday life, as well as in games. 24th of October
In my eleventh blog, I shared my progress of my poster design, displaying my concept designs for the posters. As I mentioned for my last blog recap, the posters are important to help create interest in our project and educate people about our project.25th-26th of October
In my twelfth blog, I mentioned credits for the game design and development. We wanted to ensure that all group members got credit as well as my friends who wrote the music for the digital game. Par-ticipation Digital Game Credits
In my last blog post, I talked about the last day before our project was due. This was important for our group as we wanted to ensure that all the important jobs were finished so we didnât have to rush around a few hours before its due, stressing out completing finishing touches on our project. 28th of October- Final Touches
Today was the last day before showcase, finishing up on small aspects so we donât have to stress tomorrow. My job was to ensure all the posters were printed and hung up, but I ran into an issue with printing so will have the main poster in tomorrow. We also cleaned up our area so everything is 90% ready for tomorrow, just a few touch up before everything is due. Im glad we were able to set up the majority today before the rush settles in tomorrow morning and we begin to panic over little details. It was good to see play testing today and It gave us ideas on what could go wrong or how create people can get with building their own courses which helps to emphasise our concept of physical social stimulation
On Thursday and Friday I took on the job to create a poster for our group. I found it challenging at first as I havenât make a posters for a group before, so having to incorporated everyone's likes and dislikes of the designs I had created was different from what I am used to. What I found hardest about this was starting to create poster ideas. I wasnât too sure what elements everyone would like incorporated so I took my perspective on our project and tried to visually recreate that. The pictures above are my concept designs for the poster, the common element between them all is people (socialistion) and stimulation. From there, I also felt I should include the aspect of golf into the poster as it is represents both the physical and digital comparison and similarity in our project. After creating these concepts, I shared them with the group, asking for feedback. They all shared interest in the first design above. From there I made a few iterations of that poster to see if there were any other possible layout ideas that would look better, but we all decided we still liked the first design. Now that I have completed the poster, I am going to collect all the research together, format it and get it prepared for printing on Sunday.Â
Its coming closer to the due date and my group is wrapping up our project. Today we got a few tasks done. Everyone helped to pack up on the class, after that Jake, Jack and I focused on putting the frame for the mini golf course together and sanding the wood for a nice finish, while Liam focused on final touches on the Unity games.
Credit to Liam for the Photo
After finishing up on the on the frame, we collaborated on ideas for the poster and what to do finish/complete within the next few days. Tomorrow I am going to collect material for the wall and continue working on the poster while Liam & Jack finishes the Unity games and Jake and Jared finish on the building for the course.
I feel as we progress and get closer to the deadline, our idea and project is narrowing down and beginning to form the idea we set it out to be. The comparison of social interaction between both physical and digital game stimulation. In the direction that we are heading, I feel as we will be able to achieve this message to our audience without getting people to read our research if we invest a little more time into the display presentation.
Last week we spent most of our time building progress on the golf course, user testing, building on the unity game and deciding the location of our project.Â
We started the week off with looking into where our project would be best suited. As we are initially in front of the door, we thought this might not be a good idea due to health and safety issues with people whacking the golf ball through the course. We then decided the nook that is right next to the door would be a safer place to put it as the ball would only be able to fly into the wall. With this, we began to think about how we would use the space and incorporate both games into the space. We want to create an area which is part of our project which is secluded and isolated, to mirror the idea of online gaming situations. We thought that the best way to do this was to create our own wall, to block of the player from the rest of the showcase.(picture 1 below). Jack has taken it on himself to create a frame at home made out of spare wood, while we plan to cover it with white sheet to create the wall without spending too much money on resources and health and safety issues with it falling over.
Once we had brought in the materials for our course, we started to play test immediately to see what the best way to set up the course would be. We asked classmates to judge a number of things, such as, Should the end piece be open or closed? Is the course better with three or four planks of wood in the course? What other feedback can you provide to help improve the game play experience? With these questions we were able to improve on our course and also stumble upon the idea to create a puzzle-like-course. This involves players to create their own course, making it challenging or easy to complete. It also incorporates the concept of socialisation as family members, friends or members of the public can create their own courses for each other to play. This worked well into our idea as we want to influence socialisation during the physical play course, emphasising the social stimulation you gain why playing physical games with a group of people. (picture 2 to 4 below)
Moving forward from this, we decided that if there were to be multiple different possibilities for the physical course layout, we felt that the game needed to have more options as well. The difference between the two is that one can be altered changed, such as physical game rules or ways of play can be. For the game thought it is a select choice, which is like all online single player games where the story is already set for you. I think this element will help to strengthen our project as it highlights key factors of social stimulation within the two different ways of play. As we only had one unity course, Jake and I sent some designs to Liam to increase the challenge or make it simpler to complete, which people liked to have the choice of when we play tested. (picture 5 below)
My game is based on an experience that a victim of child sexual abuse might see their home life. The pressure of the timer symbolises the parents, in which the child must collect all the chocolate before they are found. I wanted to create a game based off this topic as it is dark topic which everyone is too afraid to talk about. With my game, I hope that it would start a conversation, even though it is bad and awful, people will begin to feel more comfortable talking their own experiences as it is welcomed by more people. I feel as this is important for people to be able to talk about their experiences otherwise they can hold on to it for life, causing them long term damages such as trust issues, depression, violence and suicidal tendencies. I focused plainly on the aesthetics of my game. I believed that if I wanted to create a conversation about my game, people who play my game would have to emotionally and physically connect to the game. For this, I needed to create an atmosphere which would capture peopleâs attention but also question the meaning behind the simplistic game.
Which artists or designers are doing something similar?
There is only one other group of game designers who have created something along the topic, to help educate children about child sexual abuse in hope of preventing it. Playtime with Pantosaurus, made in Ireland, covers what areas children shouldnât be touched and a safe way to talk to your children about sexual abuse. I believe that this game is important and should be used more across the world as it will help to educate children to know when someone is touching them wrong. Even through educating children still, some will be too young to understand, or they are too young to fight anyone off or to say anything about it. Therefore, both aspects on the topic, both Pantosaurus and my version can help make a difference in their own way. Other games that are created are to either help victims deal with their trauma or for doctors to understand what happen to the victims.
 Who is writing about the concepts you are looking at, and what do they say? Do you agree? In what way?
As there arenât many people making games around the concept of child sexual abuse, but there is an organisation, AAHUNG, who help children by educating about what child sexual abuse is. They have been going around school, teach class by class, gender by gender, working with teachers and caregivers closely to help keep children safe. I believe what they are doing is helping to prevent child sexual abuse in Pakistan. The only issue with small organisations, even though they are creating a difference in their country, there are still so many more child across the world that arenât receiving help. With their media campaigns to help raise awareness about the issue this would help to spread it across the world and create influence on other people to start creating a change.
 Reflective statement
Summarize the outcomes of your work.
The meaning behind my game is to educate people who donât understand what being a victim would be like. In scene, I am an outsider looking in, this is my perspective of one situation or scenario that children would face at home. One of my views which is shown through my game is the fear that children face. In my game I tried to capture the element of pressure and fear. As a child spends most of their days, they wouldnât like the point in the day when they had to go home. I wanted to capture the idea of fear through hiding, that no matter where they go, it wonât stop, and they are too afraid to tell anyone what is happening.
 What did you observe?
In the game you play as a teddy bear who must go through a bedroom to collect all the chocolate before the time runs out. The timer represents the parents and when they are going to be home. The chocolate is a reward or something that a child desires and must face their fears and risk getting caught for it. These surrounding are very dark with childish characteristic, such as the teddy bear, the building block toys and the treasure chest. This helped to link it all back together with the idea of children. The trees in the game symbolised the strength the lurked within each child, the strength to carry on and take the risk for the reward even though they might be punished.
 What conclusions or hypotheses can you form from these observations?
What I take away from that is that it is only one perspective, of someone who is looking into an issue. I would love to be able to take this further and create different levels out of different experiences that people have been through (with permission of course) so I can take the player out of their comfort zone of gaming and place them in a spot that they donât really understand.
 What would you do next or differently if you were to start again or continue?
There is a lot of mechanical aspects that I wanted to continue to build on. As I also wasnât to experience with unity there are a lot of things that werenât finished, such as the timer respawn and the jump animation which stopped working. Moving forwards, I would like to add a score keeper, change the chocolate bars to bites and once you collect one it would start to create a bar of chocolate. I would also like to add menu screens to create some complexity to the game or even make it more like a functioning game. I still want to build upon this theme/idea of child sexual abuse as I feel as it could make for a very good game by turning heads and creating conversation if done well.
My Final assignment for Physical Computing is to create a piano keyboard out of a computer keyboard. It also produces a a screen which displays different colours each time to press a different key.
Over this past week we have all separated off into our own jobs. Both Jack and Liam have been working on creating the Unity game for the project. Both Jake and I have spilt off and started researching data to display at the showcase to explain to the audience what our project is about or is similar too. Jared has spent the week researching on materials, looking into cost and what type of wood we can use. During the week I also decided to start thinking about the layout of our project for presentation. This lead to brainstorming and a discussion between all of us on where and how we want it to look. As we want to create an isolated area for the computer game player, we are thinking of creating a small wall which will seperate the player from the rest of the showcase. We want this effect as we want to create an idea of social isolation. How many people these days spend days and nights at home in front of their computer screens playing games and still being stimulated from this entertainment. Whereas in comparison, the physical course will be open for everyone to view, introducing physical social stimulation.Â
Today was the day for really nailing down some of the aspects of our game. We spent a good amount of time discussing group roles and making sure we all knew what we were doing since we were all here, and then got on to sorting out the level design of our golf course. Yesterday we measured out our space and today I put those measurements to work in some very rudimentary sketches but also on SketchUp to create a model that we could play around with and that was really effective at showing how the proportions of the golf course would be. It also helped us to see what we could add for angles, obstacles, and elevations so that the course would be fun, but also doable fabrication-wise.
We also did a bit of asking around about how our scoring system should work, and weâve settled, for now, on a point system when players go through certain obstacles, more points for the harder obstacles. In order to make sure that players arenât just hogging the course to get the max points, theyâll have to do it in a time frame, and as incentive to get to the hole rather than just get through all the point gates, either the hole will be worth a lot of points or you wonât earn as many for not reaching it in the time. We will have to do plenty of user testing once the course and the game are up and running to make sure that we get the amount of points and the time limits balanced, but we have a rough idea we can use as a kicking off point. We used an example coloured âpathsâ diagram that Jared quickly drew up that will be our starting point with some simple points to use as a kicking off point.Â
Iâm glad we came in this morning since it gave us a really well focused couple of hours to discuss and design in a relatively quiet space and we managed to make some healthy progress. Over the weekend we can work on our respective parts and by Tuesday both the Unity game and the course should be underway.
These are the visuals we worked on Friday to start designing ideas for our course. Jack wanted to be able to create a 3D version as well so we can get a better visual understanding of what the course design may look like as well as the game. This has really helped to put things into place and sort out a scoring system for the game.
With the end of the semester approaching so is the end of game and play. For this project I was thinking of working on my own but wanted to also gain some help from someone else to help build upon the unity side of the game, is it isnât my strongest point. I talked with Harry Cronshaw about his idea of the drowning game which he wanted to implement. I did consider joining him to create a new game but I thought it would be best to just stick to what I have and try and develop it further on my own.Â
In the last review of my project there were still a lot of issues with my game. I wasn't able to figure out how toÂ
restrict the camera to the borders of the game background
fix the ridged movement of my animated character
create a death sequence or a respawn
set a timer to add pressure to the game
With in the next two weeks Iâm hoping to be able to fix these issues. With moving forward fo the final project I want my project to be based on the Aesthetic side of assignment. With my game it carries a heavy topic and I want it to make players feel uncomfortable and rushed to complete the game. It is almost the same atmosphere that a child who experiences sexual abuse would go through. They would only have a brief period of time to leave safety, find something they desire, such as chocolate, and return in time before they are caught. Even though there arenât enemies as such, I wanted to incorporate the idea of the timer as an enemy in this aspect. This will add the pressure of the situation without being to easy to identify what the game is about.Â
Today we came in on our usual day off to add an extra few necessary hours to our project. Now we know what direction we want to go in we are starting to look into the design of the course and the game. I started looking into the course layout and other mini- golf courses that are out there and how we can create one which is simplistic, entertaining but also not a danger to people at the showcase. This eliminated the idea of using a ramp in the course as this could lead to dangerous situations during play testing and the showcase if a player was to hit too hard. I started looking into different obstacles such as tunnels, pipes and bridges etc. We also talked about how we were going to create a scoring system for the game. Instead of the original way of winning by getting the ball into the hole in the fewest amount of putts, we want to encourage trick shots and different ways to gain points. We are going to continue further into designs for our possible course and other existing onesÂ
Over the weekend we set out to come up with some ideas or prototypes to help up create a direction for our project. When we meet up we discussed how both physical and digital aspects play together, and the idea of creating or remaking an original game. We initially came up with the idea to remake tetris or pong. To create two versions, one digital and one physical that two people can play at once against each other. The impact we want to create through this idea is to highlight the pros and cons of both and how they social interact with each other and how people interact with them. We want to create a direct approach so that people will be able to see a clear difference or similarity between the two, and becoming educated on how we are impacted by different stimulations. Today we have spent our time further researching into games that we can develop further that captures the aspects of both physical and digital stimulation
Throughout this week we have continued to brainstorm ideas on games that we could adapt our idea to physical and digital stimulation. We had a chat with Ricardo on Tuesday and he suggested to build on an already existing game, which will save us time but also fits into the project. On Thursday, we also talked to Ben about our project and after we had explained our idea that it didn't capture both aspects, it focuses closer on catching the physically interaction with others and disregards the digital aspect. We wanted to focus on creating a social emergence vs. a isolation. Ben suggested that we looked into slipping the two apart and go to the extremes of each, to emphasise the difference between them. This reminded us of a pervious idea of a game to develop which is mini-golf. We are thinking of making two versions, one physical and on as a digital game.
This past week we have been trying to figure out which direction we want to take our project. We have had a few issues with this as we all have different ideas and opinions we have be finding it hard to all agree on something to create that we can all enjoy. Instead, we created this brief, Develop an artifact that brings physical and technological stimulation together to have a healthy balance of both. This was a good place to restart looking at our project as it generated new ideas and conversations about how we want develop our project. With looking further into this we began to talk about mobile phone stimulation and how they can positively and negatively impact people. An example such as Instagram or snap chat, where you open the app and browse for a short time and return to your previous activity.This short interaction can help people calm down, disconnect from the real world and also de-stressed people. It can also cause attention loss and lack of motivation. With discussing this further we liked the idea of creating something that represents both technological and physical objects to show the benefits of both through one.
I further went into researching how technology impacts the body and mind, if stimulation can help improve education and looking into how computers are persuasive social actors. I really like the idea of using stimulations created by technology and playing with its effects to impact education.
I donât think I have processed so quickly into a project previously this year as I have today. I have formed to a group with Jack, Liam and Jake. We were a bit stuck on where to take our project at the beginning of the day. As I had an idea which followed along the lines of an art insulation which represents social and individual identity. But after collaborating on the idea, we thought about creating an actually product and then to complement that an art insulation.Â
We then talked to charles about our idea and he suggested to create a live brainstorm, to use poster notes and place them around something we want to focus on Impact. This is what we came up withÂ
The string in the photo showed the connections between each post that we thought could relate to one another. After we had done this, we each individually choose a connection or linked that we liked the best.
I liked the idea of extension of humans through the advancement of technology. Causing a lose of culture, race, personalities and identity due to technology.
