#fall2016notes

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Games discussed last Thursday

Asphyx

With Those We Love Alive

Call It Call Cutta In A Box

Candy Box

Parameters

Cow Clicker

Progress Quest

Little Inferno

Hello Operator

RGBriefcase

Renga

Zombies Run

Cruel 2 B Kind

Deep Sea

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Group Project 1 Week 2

Some of what was discussed in group feedback here. Check out the links and keep these ideas in mind as you move forward with your prototyping:

Perfect vs. Imperfect Information

Asymmetric multiplayer

Making Interesting Decisions

Debating the rules, folk games, acting silly

Players as performers

The goal of the assignment is to have something playable, something that works and that people can play together. Post your documentation and reflection on your process, successes, and failures on the blog and we will review next week.

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Midterm Homework - Finished Controller Design pt. 1

Midterm Assignment - due 10/20

Taking what you've now learned about materials and needs for fabrication, this assignment is the first part of a two week project.

The final delivery for this project is a finished, fabricated controller design. The requirements for that final delivery (the week AFTER next week, October 20th) are as followed:

Uses a soldered perfboard or shield board, NO BREADBOARDS.

Is constructed to be solid and permanently installed.

Experiments with at least one of the materials discussed in the previous class (solid wood, MDF, high quality plywood, metal, plastic) and at least one of the mechanical fabrication techniques.

Is built to interface with an existing game, one of your previous software experiments, or something new, via serial and one of our earlier approaches (Java robot class, node server, etc.)

Can use switches, analog inputs, sensors, anything for your circuit, as long as it will work well with your final approach. Take this into consideration.

Midterm Part 1 - due 10/13

For next week, bring in the following:

a sketch/design for your final, fabricated approach. Be professional about it.

some kind of fabrication prototype. Let's say if you were building a traditional controller that was going to use arcade buttons, one viable fabrication prototype would be a piece of plywood with correct size holes drilled and a button mounted inside. Prove that you know what it will take to handle at least one physical aspect of this.

a working electronic circuit that prototypes your functionality. This means basically the kind of prototypes that you've been bringing into class so far. Breadboards are ok.

Reference

One acceptable result for the midterm would be a traditional arcade controller. For details on how to do this, check out this extremely thorough site: http://www.slagcoin.com/joystick/mounting_layering.html - this is only one page, check them all out.

Check http://shakethatbutton.com/ for more ideas.

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Serial and Unity

Here is the code for the simple threaded solution for Serial communication for Unity.

https://github.com/hjlam1/NewArcade16

https://codeshare.io/xXWbj

The port and baud rate need to be changed to match your device settings.

In your Unity project, go to Build Settings and go to Player Settings. Change the API compatibility from .NET 2.0 subnet to .NET 2.0.

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Homework: Build a software experience and corresponding controller

We’ve been building controllers every week and we’ve explored using controllers in Unity, P5.js, and Processing.

The homework is to build a software experience (something playful or exploratory) and an appropriately corresponding controller.

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CoolTerm

Check out CoolTerm for an interesting look at your serial communication.

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Homework: P5play Animation controller

P5play is a great, simple game-making focused p5 library.

Check it out here: http://p5play.molleindustria.org/

If you are new to javascript and p5, just try using one of his animation examples and replacing it with your own animation. The goal is to couple a physical interface and visual feedback on screen in an interesting way. This means a custom animation responding to your controller.

The animation doesn't 100% have to be in p5play, and it doesn't have to be hand-drawn - but I encourage you to do so! However it is an important exercise so even if you don't use P5.js at all I still want this to be web-based - no Processing.

Watch this: The Illusion of Life

Read this: Real Time Feel

Also if you need more help with node and sockets, watch the Daniel Shiffman videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjULmG8fqc8 - he uses socket.io, but the principle is the same.

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Sending Serial to Browser via node, socket, and p5.js

Code for this week is here: https://github.com/whoisbma/New-Arcade-FA16/tree/master/week4

This has all the code EXCEPT for the two NPM modules that we installed via the command line. Those you will need to install yourselves. Make sure you have the P5 app if you're not comfortable running a local server normally.

0 - Make sure your Arduino is sending a 1 or 0 based on a button press across serial, i.e. our code from a week or two ago.

1 - Download the zip of the folders or clone the repo.

2 - In terminal, cd to either of the directories. One is wired to an animation in p5play, one is the one we did in class with the background.

3 - In terminal, install ws and serialport by typing npm install serialport and npm install ws

4 - Run either socket server code (one has slightly more stuff but does the same thing) via node in terminal by typing node socketServer.js

5 - Open the sketch.js code in the P5 app to run it, or run a local server to serve the HTML yourself (python -m SimpleHTTPServer).

Send questions to the blog if you're having trouble.

In addition, this same task can be done using other libraries - feel free to give them a try.

Socket.io - you might have used this in another class. See this discussion for the details of the differences between socket.io and ws.

P5.serialport - A P5-specific serial library - more like using the Serial library in Processing, but hiding a lot of these important details from us. Check out this tutorial from Tom Igoe.