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Studio: Crit 2

This week was another crit in which we displayed what we had to the class explaining what we plan to do and getting feedback on what we have done. For this crit we had our depth sensor image displaying on the screen, now with banding to only show a certain area, creating a silhouette. We hadn’t so far been able to figure out how to use pixels from a secondary image and get data in which it displays whether or not the secondary image overlaps with the depth image. So some research will be needed into how that could work.

We explained this and our idea for the final product having multiple players and the ability to use props. Afterwards we got quite a few good feedback ideas that we could incorperate into the game when it is fully working. Like pixelating the silhouette so its more like moving blocks to fit into a wall. As well as facing the players away from each other or blocking their view to really encourage communication.

All of these were great ideas but looking back at them, the only way we can be able to test those ideas is if we are able to get this inital game done. As they are a lot of foward thinking, when we have quite a bit to do currently. Which highlights the need to get the inital game done fast to playtest and develop.

#studio6

Studio: Reset Game Build

With the new knowledge and feedback from our inital game build, we have had to work a bit harder as we had to restart to switch to the different gameplay method. We also used this time to switch from Unreal engine to Processing, as the depth sensor library seemed to work better on the 2D framework of processing.

What we currently have is the depth sensor working and the outputing a depth image to the screen. We are currently working on how to close the depths to only show the depth between a certain, roughly a few feet wide. This is needed to make sure that hopefully only the player and props that they bring in are picked up by the sensor and not the background items.

I have also been researching into ways in which social interaction can be fostered. What I found was a scholarly paper that fits pefectly with what we are doing and the methods in which we are trying to achieve them. “Stirring up Experience through Movement in Game Play: Effects on Engagementand Social Behaviour” Paper talks about how games with differening controls more similar to natural body movement increases the level of engagement with players and in turn players social interactions between them (Lindley, Le Couteur and Berthouze, 2008). This is great news for our game and hopefully backs up our idea that people could become more welcome to social interaction between others through our game.

References:

Lindley, S. E., Le Couteur, J., & Berthouze, N. L. (2008, April). Stirring up experience through movement in game play: effects on engagement and social behaviour. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 511-514). ACM.

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Contextual (Draft)

As technology has evolved throughout the world, people have been pushed further away from each other with things like the internet and social networking taking away from everyday real life interaction. Whilst this has its benefits, the aspect of real life interaction is a true need when communicating with each other. This has significant implications in the build/make up of a person, which can be detrimental to society. This is why we want to make this game, to try and better this state and create fun and enjoyable interactions between people.

#interactionandplay

Conceptual (Draft)

For this assignment my team looks at making a game that has the ability to bring multiple people together in the real world through communication and interaction with each other.

This was based on the idea that as technology has evolved throughout the world, people have been pushed further away from each other with things like the internet and social networking taking away from everyday real life interaction. Whilst this has its benefits, the aspect of real life interaction is a true need when communicating with each other. This can have significant implications in the makeup of a person, which in turn can be end up being detrimental to society. We wanted to try and invert that idea and be able to create and harbour interaction and communication between people in the real life.

#interactionandplay

Studio : Initial Game

This week we had good start on our idea. Using the Unreal engine we had got the Kinect working with the player tracking and had set up and area where we had the wall incoming from afar. With the idea being one person sees a character on screen (Player 2 tracked by Kinect) and a wall with a shape in it coming towards it and tries to tell Player 2 (who cannot see the screen) what the shape is so that Player 2 can fit through the wall.

We had it working to a point we liked, but then were given some feedback that made us rethink our game. Which was to instead of using Kinect Skeletal Tracking (Kar, 2010) and mapping that to an character rig, use the depth sensor to restrict the depth the kinect sees and create a silhouette. Then use that silhouette as the character to make the shapes.

The reasoning behind this is that with the character you can only use a single person and are restricted in shapes to people looking like shapes. But with the silhouette it gives the ability to create shapes that require multiple people and/or props which would add a extra layer to the way the game is played and how people interact.

References:

Kar, A. (2010). Skeletal tracking using microsoft kinect. Methodology, 1, 1-11.

#studio6

Studio: Crit Slides

This week we had to present our studio project idea to the class in a crit. These slides can be seen here. We talked about how the idea of social interaction is being lost through the more frequent use of mobile devices and electronic communication (Humphreys, 2005). As well as our current idea we are looking at, which is a game based of the game show “Hole in the Wall” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucKk_H71B74. But through the use of Kinect and spliting the controls over two or more people to create the need for communication.

We got alot of good feedback on the presentation and the idea which will be kept in mind when creating our project. Some of the feedback we got was on the presentation itself, where we had to much writing on screen leading to us getting lost in our speech and showing as much through as little as possible. On the idea side we were told we pretty much just needed to get it working as quickly as possible as playtesting would be the primary conern and getting feedback on it.

References:

Boundless. “Understanding Social Interaction.” Boundless Sociology. Boundless, 13 Apr. 2016. Retrieved 04 May. 2016 from https://www.boundless.com/sociology/textbooks/412/social-interaction-5/understanding-social-interaction-50/understanding-social-interaction-314-5912/

Humphreys, Lee. "Cellphones in public: social interactions in a wireless era." New media & society 7.6 (2005): 810-833.

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Communication: Studio 6

For studio this semester, we will be taking the core idea from first semester, building communication between people, and evolving it from what we had in the first semester, under a more iterative play design model. In the first semester we made aMaze, which was a maze game that used communication to guide one of the players through the maze. This worked for our project and solved the idea of getting people to communicate, but when we are looked at it from a game perspective, it probably could have used more time to be tested and iterated on. Which lead us to our project this semester.

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Iteration: Interaction and Play

Our first project of Interaction and Play is to take an existing game and iterate on it in a short time frame. The game we chose to iterate on was our Maze game from the previous semester. To start we looked at our feedback on it from the previous semester and what issues we found from people who had played it. One area we thought would be best to look at is feedback and showing users that their input was registered, as a lot of the time we heard people asking if it was working or not realizing that their input was being registered on the other screen. So went about brainstorming some ideas coming up with a few that could work within the time frame; like having a light on the users screen to show that they registered the input or having a sound or animation that played on an input. We are going to start with one of these and see how it works before iterating on the game again if time allows.

#interactionandplay

Delivery / Reflection

Above is an image of our final exhibition. I believe it came out pretty good, fitting what we aimed to present at the start of the semester. I also believe the workflow used helped to get it to the final outcome. It helped focus my group and I, bring us back on track and gave us good contingencies for things to go wrong.

Although it might not have worked for everything, I think that if we were to give ourselves more of a contingency we would probably end up using it all or not give us enough time to actually do the project. So it ends up being a major balance because in the real world we don’t have all the time in the world to give ourselves and most of the time it will be someone else who chooses how much we are given.

But overall I think having this workflow did help better my project and the way I work. Also if I were to use the ideas I learned in the process of figuring out this workflow and added it back into the workflow and made a new project, it could be even better.

#creativeworkflows

Filming

For the last group aspect of the project we needed to see and record peoples interactions with each other while using the arcade. Because this couldn’t be done till last this was where we really felt like we had less time due to overtime from other parts of the project. Although we got it done, it’s interesting to do this project and think about it near the end like this and think about how the workflow did or didn’t have an impact on this. It makes me think about what could have be done differently to better that end situation.

(Link to final video if you want to watch http://youtu.be/-03ko64TDUo)

#creativeworkflows

Final Timetable:

Like I said on the previous timetable, this is our final timetable with how we went during our project below. With the colours meaning;

Orange = Planned time to be taken Blue = Actual time taken Red = Overtime Yellow = Planned but unused

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BxxQnQOzLRFYbYx_mxpf0hb0Sz6gto4HVlrieeHcnnQ/edit?usp=sharing

#creativeworkflows

Carving Back Time / Scale

With my team member back now and the problems with the wiring solved, my team and I are doing our best to try and get everything else left done in any amount of time earlier than planned, in an attempt to try and accumulate some time to spare in the end. We will end up seeing if it works but if it doesn’t we have chosen to scale back a bit in what the actual arcade does. Having chosen to drop implementation of sound effects in the game if time is not permitting, as for us and how our studio project is marked, it is more about what the impact on the people playing our arcade does and how we show that impact than the actual arcade itself.

#creativeworkflows

Wiring / Everything Falls Apart

When we had the lecture on how everything falls apart I had not had that experience yet in this project and thought that if it were to happen I would be able to circumnavigate it, by having a contingency or by using a different method. Unfortunately for me I managed to find myself with the exact problem I thought I could avoid. This happening after wiring up the controls for the game to be played, as they for one reason or another would not work properly, and for a while everything I did didn’t fix it. I also couldn’t change the system because it was the primary input for the device to work and time continued to run out. After a bunch of wasted time though I did manage to fix it with a bit of coding in the arduino program. But it did have an impact on the time we had allocated to it. In having this problem it got me looking back at how in the end there is always things that will go wrong in the project and it is how we balance our time and work that ends up dictating whether that problem will impact the final result.

#creativeworkflows

Contingencies II:

During the last week before mid-semester break one of our group members was in hospital sick for a week. Luckily it didn’t impact our project much due to the timing of it, when he got back and what we were doing at that moment. We also had set up a contingency before that happened in the form of an internal deadline so technically we didn’t lose a week, which is also why I wasn’t going to write about.

That sort of changed now, because my other group member is now in the hospital for a week with the exact same thing. Talk about odd coincidence and terrible timing as this time we are deep into finishing our arcade and was originally planned to soon go and see what interactions people have with it. But like before we did have a week planned free at the end, but with this now taking that away it is scary to think there is no spare time left now if anything goes wrong.

#creativeworkflows

Personal Workflow:

For my personal workflow in building the project I went about making a checklist that included each step needed for me to complete one side of the arcade, This way I could always see what needed to be done and know the order in which they were needed. I believe it helped quite a lot in mainly managing my time and not wasting a lot of it. As one thing I hadn’t taken account for in the workflow was the amount of time the workshops were open, this impacted how much time in a day I was able to get done. Luckily this checklist allowed me to shave enough time back to the point in which I was where I expected to be on our group timeline.

#creativeworkflows

Updated Timetable:

Another aspect from formative feedback we wanted to look at was our timetable and developing a more complex version of the one we previously had. This one now has a schedule to the day of what needs to be done and how long it will take. It also splits up the jobs so we can easily see which ones need to be done, how long they will take and if multiple will be done at the same time.

We also already have had a bit of feedback on this timetable, which was to include a bar under each one to show how long it took in the actual project. So near the end I will upload another updated timetable that will show how the project went.

#creativeworkflows

Team Roles:

Some feedback after formative was to make our workflows more complex. So to do this we started by going through all the roles and jobs that needed to be done to complete our project and writing our who will do what/ what jobs every body has. (Some jobs above need more than just one of us so they include initials next to job) My biggest job is the building of the console, so as it could take the longest, I will need look at my personal workflow to insure it gets done on time.

#creativeworkflows

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