#year2semester2

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9# The start of documentation again

06/05

In our second week of online learning, we were provided with resources and sheets related to documentation which aided us in our planning and refining our idea. We were able to complete both, I think we worked quite efficiently today!

Link to our project planning doc here

Link to our statement of intent here

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CTEC608 - Studio: Toxic Mushrooms BLOG INDEX

ENTRY 1 |  ENTRY 2 |  ENTRY 3 |  ENTRY 4 |  ENTRY 5 |  ENTRY 6 |   ENTRY 7 |  ENTRY 8 |  ENTRY 9 |  ENTRY 10 |  ENTRY 11 |  ENTRY 12 |  ENTRY 13 |  ENTRY 14 |  ENTRY 15 |  ENTRY 16 |  ENTRY 17 |

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17# The Crit

This presentation was important as it gave the opportunity to showcase our developed concept and progress to our lecturers  Initially I was quite worried as I was not able to get as much of the coding done as I would have liked to. But I was genuinely surprised to hear that they were interested in this project despite the physical outcome being nowhere near polished. Ben saying that he was glad the project is not finished really stuck to my mind. And it really drove home the point and emphasised the importance of having a well-developed concept and idea rather than focusing on completing it rushed. And how the 12 weeks we have to complete this project is arbitrary and rather constricts us timewise possibly having an effect on our priorities of finishing the project. Nonetheless, I’m glad crit went rather well. And I’ll be working hard to get something up to standard for Showcase.

Final setup for crit

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16# Collision

Before the crit session coming up I thought I’d at least make a collider with the objects to demonstrate how the mushrooms would interact with each other. Upon researching tutorials I tried using the ‘collision 2D box’ component around each of the mushrooms. Since I had a background set up, my plan was to make it so that there was a duplicate image of the same mushroom (but with a ‘dull’ colour palette) underneath the original, and that a collision between two mushrooms would result in the original image of the mushroom changing its z value, thus going underneath the background image and leaving the duplicate image of the mushroom, creating the image that the mushroom has ‘changed appearances’. 

Unfortunately, however, I was not able to get it to work on time. It was probably due to my lack of research that I failed to conduct it. I will look into it more in the future.

Mushroom and its ‘hitbox’ (the green box)

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15# Convoluted solution?

I knew that I needed some kind of movement to showcase during the ‘presentation’ coming up. So I turned to a make-shift temporary solution. Instead of using one fiducial code to control both axis, I made it so that one fiducial controls the x-axis on one card while another controls the y-axis of the same card. I admit it's a bit convoluted. But if this experience has taught me anything, it's that sometimes you need to look for more unconventional solutions for you to reach your goal. Thankfully the idea worked and I got the mushrooms to move independently from each other. A reminder that this is just a temporary solution until I look into the movement of objects using fiducials in more detail.

‘makeshift’ cards

Testing movement

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14# Technical struggles

It was quite a challenge trying to make the object move vertically and horizontally using one fiducial code… at one point I looked into using TUIO messages instead of using midi messages, as well as looking into ‘Uniducial’  (Unity support for fiducials) guides. I came to the conclusion that these methods strictly specialised in Unity 3D and this project was set up in Unity 2D. Another method I’d try was altering the code so that one fiducial was mapped to both horizontal and vertical faders. I don’t quite think it worked like that, however, as I assume one fiducial can only be mapped to one type of movement when I tried it out. 

I admit this was a tougher challenge than I thought. I will work it out though.

Working with newly made mushroom sprites

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13# Movement

For a while, I've been working on getting movement to move for the mushrooms. Because I did something similar to this last semester (project: ‘Work in Progress’), gladly, I was quite familiar with the gist of how Reactivision worked as last semester I was able to use it with midi controls. Unfortunately, however, I can’t personally say I have had many experiences with Unity. So I take this as an interesting challenge and hope that I can gain some new knowledge after this project. 

Thankfully, the code used from last sem project was available to me and I used it as a base (thank you Liam). The code allowed for the object to move side to side, my challenge was making the object move with the y-axis as well as the x-axis. Soon after playing around with different features in Unity and getting used to the layout, I was able to get the object moving side to side. Now the challenge begins…

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12# Unity

Though it was not my first time being in a project that was associated with Unity, I admit that I was not too confident in using the game engine. But I was determined to figure it out and learn something new. I followed a brief tutorial on Lynda about constructing a Unity 2D game and used it to construct a foreground and background. As well as adding game objects and so on, I used placeholder sprites for the three types of mushrooms. The next plan of action was to get the mushrooms to more with Reactivision.

Using sample mushroom sprites and constructing background