CCDN 231, Assignment 3 Write up

Richard Hpa

CCDN 231

300226122

Tutor: Philippa Shipley

Glamour. It is defined on thefreedictionary.com as ‘an air of compelling charm, romance, and excitement, especially when delusively alluring’. But glamour is not something that can be strictly defined. It all depends on the viewer. In an extract from the book ‘Glamour: Women, History, Feminism’ written by Carol Dyhouse (2011) she states ‘glamour (like beauty) can be judged to exist in the eye of the beholder rather that which is beholden’ (pg1). She is ultimately saying that something that might be glamorous to one person might not be to another. But I believe that there is one thing, which is always glamorous to everyone, themselves. Everybody in his or her own way finds himself or herself glamorous. And I wanted to create an experience which focus’s on the aspect of self-glamour.

                                                                                               

The idea of self-glamour is something that can be involved with everybody. There are times in everyone’s life where (no matter what they look like) they find themselves glamorous’ In a Journal Article written by Carol S. Gould (2005) titled ‘Glamour as an Aesthetic Property of Person’. She states that ‘Glamour, I argue here, is this sort of personal quality’ (pg. 237).  What Gould is saying is that glamour all depends on the person. That glamour is personal and no one person can define what is glamorous and what is not. When reading that quote it gave me the sense that everyone is glamorous in his or her own way. So if everyone were to think of him or herself as ‘glamorous’, then this experience would emphasize that idea. Another quote which I found that that strengthens the last one was in ‘The Times UK’ Newspaper, this article written by Joan Collins (2006) states ‘Glamour has a lot to do with attitude and poise -the internal virtues’ (pg57).

Quotes like what was written by Dyhouse, Gould and Collins are the reason why I did this experience. In all three quotes they do not mention anything about looks but more of a ‘personal’ or ‘internal’ feel to glamour. All these quotes support each other which states that there are a lot of people believe that glamour isn’t just all about beauty. Making an experience that makes everyone feel glamorous has to not involve things that are gold and glittery, or are which I myself consider glamorous, but things, which I believe that everyone finds glamorous.

The Inspirations for my experience came from the 1937 Disney film Snow White directed by David Hand. The main thing that inspired me to do this experience is the magic mirror where it will tell you who the fairest person of them all is. I am planning on taking that part of the film and twisting it a bit to suit my experience of making someone feel glamorous. Like all of the Disney Princess’s, Snow White was shown to be extremely beautiful and glamorous. Snow White is a film that a lot of people have watched during their childhood. Many girls in their childhood have often dreamt about being like Snow White and being ‘the most fairest of them all’. So especially for girls I hope that my experience would bring back a sort of nostalgia from when they were a child, where they would dress up as princesses and make themselves as glamorous as they could be.

My experience was designed to make the user feel glamorous by projecting a live video feed to them onto a mirror. At first the mirror had just written on it, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most glamorous of them all’. When the user presses the spacebar on the computer, then the words rippled like it were a pool of water and then fade to the live feed of them. I believe that my experiment was a success and all the users enjoyed the experience, and they were all quite mesmerized by it. This links in very well with a quote in Elizabeth Wilson’s (2007) entry titled ‘A Note on Glamour’ written in the Journal ‘Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture’, She stated that in the eighteenth century glamour was described as ‘when devils, wizards or jugglers deceive the sight, they are said to cast a glamour over the eyes of the spectator’ (pg96). The experience was not designed to focus on just one person but for anyone to participate in.

While the users were participating in my experience I was recording them from a camera, which was placed next to the mirror, so I could record their reactions to what they saw on the mirror. I recorded 4 different people and in all four cases they were all surprised by the outcome of my experience. When spoken to after the camera finished recording the users stated that it was quite beautiful and quite memorizing. And according to ‘Glamour: Making it Modern’ by Michael Lassell (2009), ‘One could, at one time, speak of being ‘under a glamour’, as being under a spell or enraptured’ (pg8). Two of the testers said that they could not keep their eyes off the screen because they were surprised at what was happening.

In the end I believe my experience was a success and that it did create a glamorous feeling to the user. The response to my experience was positive and was linked real close to some of the quotes which I got, especially Lassell’s quote from Glamour: Making it Modern, which pretty much linked perfectly with the responses. This experience worked exactly as I had planned it to and I am really happy with the outcome

References:

Gould C S (2005). ‘Glamour as an Aesthetic Property of Person’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 63(3), 237-247.

Collins, J. (2006, April 22). Glamour: [final edition]. The Times. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.helicon.vuw.ac.nz/docview/319504665

Extract from Dyhouse, C. (2011) Glamour: Women, History, Feminism. London: Zed Books.

Wilson, E. (2007). A Note on Glamour. Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture. 11 (1), p95-108.

Lassell, M (2009). Glamour: Making it Modern. New York: Filipacchi Publishing.

Hand, D. (Director). (1937). ‪Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . [Motion Picture], United States: Walt Disney Productions

Words count: 930

MDDN 243, Project 3, Refection

I am quite proud on how the final game came out. It took a lot of work and a lot of late nights. But we are all happy with it. 

If we were to do this project again we would defiantly plan our time more wisely so we don't have a lot to do on the last day. Also we wanted to add in some sort of scoring system into the game, sort of like what angry birds have with their stars at the end of each level. And we wanted there to be a bonus round if you complete all under a specific time.

We have all decided that we want to keep expanding on the game and keep working on it as a hobby throughout the summer. Our goal is to do all the things which we wanted to do for the final and also turn it into an ipad game. And hopefully once it is 100% done but it on the itunes or google plus store.

MDDN 243, Project 3, Baby problem

I have figured out what was wrong with the collisions with the baby why he disappeared. It was because he had to many frames in the animation which I wanted to play.

To get around this I have split up the animations into 2 sets. The sucking animation which plays right when the collision happens and a Spitting animation which happens when the space bar is pressed when the sucking animation is playing.

Another problem which I found is that the baby would be pushed when the collision happens. At first what I did was make it that the baby cannot be pushed. But then the baby would walk underneath the tables and chairs in the room. To get around that what I did was just make the mass of the baby 150kg. So since the batteries mass is only 1 Kg he doesn't have enough mass to be able to push the baby.

MDDN 243, Project 3, Sound

In our game we have some really awesome sounds. James has made all the sounds from scratch which is really awesome. In the main levels we have different tracks which are on loop for the entire game. They dont seem like they are looping but are just one massive track. We have a few other sound effects aswell. The ones which are in the game at the moment is the sound which happens when the battery hits a power up.
We have other sound effects like ones for charging and the baby and they are going in as soon as we manage to fix the babies collision problems

MDDN 243, Project 3, Baby animations + Collisions

For our game the bad guy is a baby, yes I know a baby but hey its the only thing we could find out to be bad for batteries. The movement of the battery is an AI. He will always follow the battery as long as it is on screen. His speed changes every few seconds so sometimes he might be following you really slow and the next it would be really fast. What happens for his movement is that if the x is greater than the battery its left animation will be used and if the x is lower than the right animation will turn on.

What we want to happen is that when the baby hits a battery then the babies animation will change to one that has him sucking on the battery. When this happens I want to disable the movements of the battery and hide the actor and when the animation is finished it will all turn back on. The same code applies to that as the movement. If the babies x is greater than the batteries than play left sucking animation.





But something has gone wrong with this. Whenever the baby hits a battery both the baby and the battery will disappear. I have no idea what is going on with this and it is really frustrating me. I am trying to get it to work. But if it doesn't work we have decided to make it that the baby just dies and then will go to a kill screen for the baby. Hopefully we can get it to work before the final hand in.

CCDN 231, Project 3, Documentation

Here are 4 videos of people participating in my experience.

Alex Le

CCDN 231, Alex Testing from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

Ian Ferguson

CCDN 231, Ian Testing from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

Dr Sarah Baker

CCDN 231, Sarah Testing from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

Philippa Shipley

CCDN 231. Philippa Testing from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

MDDN 243, Project 3, HUD

Our HUD for our game has gone through several different atheistic changes. All of them have had the same lines of code to keep them from working.
They have all be anchored to the screen so that they don't even leave the spot which they are in.

Our final HUD was quite complicated though.

For our new Hud we have the actor on the top left and the amount of charge which he had. The image of him changes depending on what your energy level is and also if you have a power up on or not.

They are all one actor type that has no collision on it so it doesn't get effected by other actors. So what happens is depending on a specific event the images will change.

As for the HUDs at the bottom of the screen. They represent the appliances which are in the room. At the beginning of the level they will all be unknown. which means that you have to find out where they are. Once you have found the appliance around the scene the image will then change to an image of that appliance. If you are outside of the charging region for the character the image will darken a little bit but once you get back in it will return to normal.

 Just like the Characters HUD these have no collisions and are anchored to the screen so they wont move and wont be affected by other objects in the room.

To get the Appliance HUDS to work I made it that when the character is in a region the animation for the HUDS actor will change depended on what happens.

CCDN 231, Project 3, Documentation

Here are some pictures of my CCDN 231 experiment which I did the other week. The photos are of the set up of the experiment. There will be videos of people participating in my experiment coming up in the next couple days

MDDN 243, Project 3, Intro screen

For our game we want to have an intro screen before you go into the room selection screen. We want this so that the player has the option to go to either the game, or go see the instructions, and I also had the idea that we have an about screen which will tell the user about the game and also have a QR code for each of us which will link to our game design blogs if the user wants to learn more.

For the main Screen we have an image of our character and also the title 'Charge'. We also have to 3 options for what you could do next. To get this we made that the 3 options were actor types which have two animations. One where the word is written out and the other one is just an expanded version of that image. What happens is when you press the up or down arrow key whatever actor type you are on it will change to the expanded version.

To get this I set 3 Boolean variables. New Game, Instructions and About. At first New Game is set to true while the others are set to false. Whenever one of the 3 are set to true it will switch to the expanded animation for the actor. And when down is pressed. If New Game is set to true then it will be set to False and then Instructions will be set to true. And this happens for all 3 of the options. Also to get to the next screen its set as, when spacebar is pressed, if new game = true, switch scene to scene select. and that happens for each of the 3 and go to their corresponding pages.

MDDN 243, Project 3, Winning/Losing the game + Level select

For our game the way to win the game is to make all of the appliances which are in the room to have more than 75% of there charge. We thought of the idea to making it have to be 100% but it couldn't work because of each of the appliances losing power every 3 seconds. We also thought of the idea that if a charge were to get to 100% then it would stay at 100% and you would win when all of the appliances are at 100% but then we thought against it because it wouldn't be to challenging.





So I have made a scene behavior for winning and losing the game and have attached it to the 3 levels. What I have done is that if appliance 1 = 75 or more, and appliance 2 = 75% or more, and etc etc, then it would go to a new scene which would let you know that you have won the level.

For the lose screen I have made it that if appliance 1 = 0, or appliance 2 = 0, etc etc, than it would go to another new screen which will be the lose screen. Telling you that you need to redo the level. Each level has a different losing screen that has each of the different appliances on it. James has made these.

For the Scene select we have made it that it is a door way which has 3 doors in it with each of them opening to the level.
In the scene screen there are regions just infront of each of the doors and once the character is in them the image of the door will change to an open door.
As you can see if the code for win screen there is an attribute called Level 1 completed and Level 2 completed. They originally start as false so if you want to enter the next room you have to complete the previous room to be able to go into the next one.

CCDN 231, Assignment 3, Final experiment

I have finished making my processing file for what i am going to use for the final experiment.
I didn't manage to figure out how to restart the webcam once its one so I have to completely restart the program again once I have done it once, which is quite annoying when I want to experiment on more than one person right after each other.

When I upload the file into Open Processing (which is a website to share what people have made on processing) it doesn't read that I have a webcam because it is being played over the internet and not my laptop, I cant upload my experience so you can do it on here.

What I have done is recorded my screen of me doing my experience.
Me testing my CCDN 231, Assignment 3 from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

So this is what it would look like for when I test my Experience with my tutor and class mates. The only difference will be that the background will be white and it will be projected onto the white wall of the ergo lab with my mirror hung up.

CCDN 231, Project 2, Progress

I have made some good progress on my experience.

Using processing I have figured how to turn the webcam on my laptop on. I have also figured out how to make it that when the space bar is pressed that the webcam will turn on.

For my starting screen I want it to say, 'Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the most glamourous of them all?' I have made a still image to use as the main screen.

When space bar is hit I want the image to ripple like it would if it were water and a stone was hit onto it.

I have managed to do that and here is a small video showing what it looks like



ripple video from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

So this will happen once the user presses Enter. At this moment I dont know how to get out of the video screen which is what I am trying to sort out next

MDDN 243, Project 3, Animations

From what Kah and Ben have suggested they think that to show the health of our main character more, that it would be cool to have the power levels shown on the battery. So as his health goes down so does the level of liquid in our battery.
As the Lead Graphics Designer Alex has made several different versions of our character. One at 100%, 75%, 50%, 25% and 0%. Here is a view of the 50% and the 0%

Finding a way to change the 4 movement animations 5 separate times for each movement was quite difficult. At first I decided to try and make it that at every stage of the the batteries power level.

I created a scene behavior and this is the code which I used to make it

It is quite difficult to see but what is ultimately happening is that when Battery Charge = 10, it is killing the current actor and creating the new 75% actor in the same place as the last actor. And that is repeating for the 10 stages of the Batteries life.

This didn't work as well as I thought it would. What ended up Happening was that it was constantly killing the actor which was on the screen and replacing it with the same type of actor. So what the code was saying is that if the battery charge is 10, which is it a lot of the time because that is the starting value, to kill  the actor. And because the battery charge is 10 for quite awhile, the entire time it is 10 it is killing the actor.

So this idea was scrapped because it was lagging the game to much.




What I did next is that i looked at the behavior which created the 8 way movement for the actor. I found that the code which told the game which animation to play was like this.

So what is setting the up animations is the attribute 'up animation'. The same thing is repeated for all of the other movements in the game.

So for our 1 character I have put all the different animations for each of the 4 movements, as well as idle animations and the animations for the power up actors and also the charging animations for our character. At this moment he has over 65 different animations. But what I have made it to do is that if Battery charge = 10, set 'up animation' to 'Front 100' and if it equals either 9, 8 or 7 to set 'up animation' to 'Front 75'. And this is repeated for all the the movements including idle states.

This way works perfectly fine as it is the same Actor the entire time. Testing it out works perfectly and it also can include the animations for the power up actors when the attributes 'Solar', 'Wind' and 'Nuclear' are true.

Here is a small video of our character changing into all the stages in a scene



changing states from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

CCDN 231, Assignment 3, Progress

After talking with my Tutor and several students about my idea, I believe that my experience will work quite well.

I have figured out the equipment I am going to need it
- Laptop
- Data Projector
- Mirror Frame

Those are the main things which I am going to need. I have decided to try and do the experiment in the ergo lap because I think that it would work really well against the white backdrop.

I have recently gone down to the salvation army store in Tawa and bought a nice Frame for my mirror. I wanted it to be sort of old and gold because old Frames are often what people perceive as glamourous.

MDDN 243, Project 3, Alpha testing

For our first testing with the rest of the class we only had 1 level working properly.
The comments which we got were really useful and will extremely help us to improve our game.

The things which we need to sort out are
- Think about charge Balance (going down to fast?)
- Fades when you receive a power up (people think game is over)
- Needs Furniture
- More Animations
- Needs Instructions
- Make life more obvious
- Restart from within the stages instead of the home screen
- Fix Power Ups spans also are they to short?
- Fix Baby Disappearing

Those are the main things which we need to work on and by the next presentation we want more of them to be sorted out.

MDDN 243, P3, Power ups

For our game we have 3 power ups.
- Solar - unlimited energy
- Wind - increased speed
-Nuclear - unlimited energy and increased speed but extremely unstable

James has made the animations for the power ups and the animations for them are really cool.
In these images they are pixilated quite a lot because the original size is 50px x 50px.

I have made the power ups each an actor type but they are sensors. This means that the main actor which is the battery can walk right over one of the power ups.

I have also made a new scene for each of the power ups. So technically for each Level there will 4 versions of that level. For example there will be Level 1, Level 1 Wind, Level 1 Nuclear and Level 1 Solar. This makes it easier to have the difference in speed and the other effects onto the character. Here is a video of an example of this using the Solar power up.

power ups from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

CCDN 231, Assignment 3

For the third assignment we are to make an experience which will make the user feel a specific way.
I have chosen to expand on my previous assignment and I am going to focus on trying to create a Glamourous experience. I am a media Designer so I am going to try and create the experience using coding which is something we learn in media design.

My idea comes from the disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

I want to focus on the idea of Mirror mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all

My idea is to use the coding program called processing and make a processing file which will have the words 'Mirror Mirror on the wall, Who's the most Glamourous of them all' When the participant  presses the enter or spacebar button the screen will ripple from the screen to an image or live video of themselves. 

I hope that this will create that experience because from what I learnt from the last assignment Glamour is something which is different from person to person. And what I believe is that everyone thinks of themselves as glamourous in some way or another

MDDN 243, Project 3, Barriers and Collisions

For our game our character will be inside different rooms in a house. At the moment we are aiming on having 3 rooms with 3 different sizes which represent the different levels of the game.

We have decided that the level which we are working on is going to be our level 3, which is the largest level. Around the edges of the level we are having a barrier or according to Stencyl a 'Terrain'. These will make the character know where the ends of the map are so he cannot enter the terrain, but will instead be blocked by it.

We are also going to be using Terrains when we are going to add obstacles into the game like desks and chairs. The character will be able to move under then but will be stopped when they hit the legs of the objects.


Each of our characters have a different collision box which is dependent on the character. Here are some examples of the collision boxes for 3 of our characters.

Each character will differently interact with other objects

The Battery
will collide with
- The baby
- Power ups
- Walls
-  Obstacles on the map
- Other appliances

The Baby
will collide with
- The battery
- Walls
- Obstacles on the map
- Other appliances

CCDN 231, assignment 2, Final hand in

Here is my final write up for assignment 2

Open publication - Free publishing - More apples

MDDN 243, P3, sound and animations

James is our sound guy and he has made some real awesome sounds for our game. We have one track which is looping while the character is in the main screen. He has also made sounds for the power ups and the start and end game screen.

At the moment we just have the starting screen sound and the in game sound. They are both made to cross fade over 2 seconds once they go from level to level.

Alex has made this first lot of animations for our character. These might not be actually used in the final game but it will be similar. He has made the walking animations and the charging animations. Adding the walking animations was easy because we had the 8 way movement as the default movements. But the charging animation got quite difficult to sort out.

We have made it that enter is the button which you will press to charge up the character. Here is the first part of the code which I used to try and get it to work. 

What happened with this is that when enter was pressed it would change the animation but it wouldn't change it back. So I added this section of code to make it work.

So what this part of code means that when the button is pressed it will do the animation but when the button is released it will go back to the original animation.

Here is a video of what happens in the game

charging from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

MDDN 243, Project 3, Health Bar

For our game we want to have a health bar to show the charges for the battery and the other appliances.  At the moment the battery and the appliances will have 10 health points and will be going down by 10 intervals.
The Appliance charges will go down by 1 point every 5 seconds.

I am thinking of something like this for the health bar

We want there to be at least 3 different colour ranges on our health bar. We want green for 60% +, yellow for 30% - 60% and red for 0% to 30%.

When coding the health bar for the battery, I drew a green line to show the full health. I tried to make it that the end X value will be reduced by 10 whenever the Battery charge goes down by 1. This didnt work as I wanted it to, so in the end what I did was that if Battery charge = 10 it will draw a green line and if Battery Charge = 9 it will draw a different like with the same starting X and Y and the same end Y but the ending X will be shorter. This was repeated for every one of the 10 different segments for the batteries health. The colour also changes slightly each time going from Green to Red.