Media+Code

I want to make a 2 player game that can be played using a single iPad. The idea is to have the players racing on a track on the middle of the playing area – a bit like in the arcade classic Slick & Slide. The cars have a constant speed and the only thing the players have to do is steer the vehicle in the direction of the track, by pressing down RIGHT or LEFT buttons. If the player leaves the track, the car speed slows down considerably.

When a player wins a race he or she receives a crown. When a player has 3 crowns, they win the game! The loser is given the opportunity to challenge the winner to a rematch.

Here is the presentation slides: Project Proposal: Multitouch Racing PDF

My project is about creating a simple game prototype using multitouch controls. Please check it out!

multitouch_game_cristian_diaz

I will make a multitouch game for kids. The player or players control small objects (colors, numbers or characters) and try to solve problems/missions, such as combining colors or numbers which creates sounds.

“Become the biggest.”

Inspiration: Osmos and Auralux. Auralux is quite musical, the game experience is fun.

http://www.auraluxgame.com/support.html

http://www.osmos-game.com/

My project is a simple game. You press the button “Launch!” and this creates 15 coloured balls, 10 blue ones and five pink ones with numbers. They bounce around the screen, being confined by the borders. (Perhaps the accelerometer will also dictate which way they are bouncing? I haven’t decided yet.) You need to touch the pink balls in order (1-5), and once you do, they explode. This could be made more difficult by speeding up the rate at which the balls bounce.

This explosion is cool, I might try to simulate something of this sort but simpler, with just flat colours like these screenshots.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpXfSwIeox8

There are a lot of appliances and toys that are related with snow in Finland, which is quite unique and different from other countries.Then,it wouldn’t hurt anybody if there is one more addition to them. So I came up with ideas with snow.

1. Cleaning Snow

I’m thinking of making app to clean snow not with fingers but with a real brush or a shovel to make the experience get more tangible and real. There are a number of examples out there already that is involved with the tangible interaction on multitouch devices but I think there still exists some potential or at least it is still interesting to me. I can design a yard or a street to get snowed so that the user clean snow  with the brush made of conductive thread.

2. Licking Snow

This is the second option. At first I thought about making a simple snow catching game with beautiful generative snow flakes but to my disappointment I found out a similar flash game already exist. But I think I can make it different.

generative snow flakes designed by http://www.metaphorical.net/

Eyes/pairs of eyes(not yet decided) will float in darkness and sing together a (creepy) bedtime tune(a capella), which can be different depending on the combination the user chooses with the fingers. Each eye will have its own specific voice/part. They will also make sounds every time they hit one another (first second of their specific sound, let’s say). Will float, but can be dragged by the user (or pressed and kept in place); whenever they are pressed, they will start the tune.

Maybe it could have a simple music box loop playing in the background all the time, or more probably some ambience.

It’s quite difficult to explain my idea using graphics, but basically this is how the app should look like:

Oh, and the (main) inspiration source:

Proposal_jinpingliu

I have two concepts for the final project and both of them are mainly about dragging gesture.

The first one is a multitouch puzzle game which allows kids to learn Chinese characters through doing the puzzles made up by the strokes of Chinese characters. The goal for this game is to make the boring and difficult learning process more appealing for kids.

The second concept is a multitouch app which provides various characters, scenes and objects to help service designer quickly generate scenarios video of their design. Since I worked as service designer in previous course, I found it really tricky for designers to generate scenarios. It always required designer with the skills of sketching and video editing. And their is no tool in the market that worked for that specific purpose. So I think an app might be helpful.

I’ll develop a simple instrument app for kids as a side project to the Foxströms game we’re developing together with friends and Medialab graduates. The app uses the same instrument set that is in the Foxströms game, but without the characters playing them. Now the user can be the player!

The concept is called Foxströms Instrument Workshop. The concept idea is divided into 3 steps.

The first step is that the user can visit the instrument workshop of the band and test out how the different instruments sound and play them. There is the same set of instruments that in the original game. User can choose one instrument at a time. The chosen instrument is highlighted. There are pads on the screen for playing. Each pad plays a sound on a certain pitch.

The second step is to make the instrument sounds adjustable, using Maximilian Open Frameworks add-on. There will be basic effects that can be applied to the instrument sound: delay, distortion, chorus and flanging.

The third step is to allow the user to record their own sound and then play that sound. That can either be done with granular synthesis or with individual sounds for each pad. Probably I won’t have time to go this far, and the concept of the app has changed few times. But anyway, it’s an idea.

During the exploration exercises I came up with 4.5 proto-ideas (I was told that we’re entitled to have many ideas :D ). I present them in order of appearance.

Option 1 — Recursion

I’m still unsure where to go with this one, but I’d like to study recursion and its properties in programing. I’ve already started a prototype and it seems to display interesting configurations when I used the phone’s accelerometer. They usually look like this:

My prototype so far:

Option 2 — Clock

Again no developed idea yet, but I’d like to try using the iPhone time info to design some kind of experimental clock. Maybe adding reaction to sound could make it more interesting, but I already did a sound visualizer for a similar course and would like to try something else. Some ideas/benchmarks are the following:

(http://www.creativeapplications.net/ipad/last-clock-ipad/)

(http://www.creativeapplications.net/iphone/kulerclock-iphone/)

What I have so far (I know, not much, but maybe with some work…):

Option 3 — Blocks

A varied iPhone version of the Ghostcube. This could be two- or threedimensional but it seems to me that either would work out really well with some multitouch interaction. This link shows a video of the object:

http://www.notcot.org/post/56884/

Option 4 — Kaleidoscope

A Kaleidoscope built with images from the front camera. Dragging repositions the image crop and tilting the phone messes with the colors.

Here are a few inspiration images:

(Olafur Eliasson’s Kaleidoscope)

And a screenshot from my prototype:

Option 4.5 — Recursive Kaleidoscope

It would be nice if I could join the 4th idea with the first one and have a recursive Kaleidoscope. Not sure how much these processes get along with each other, but inspired by the pictures I see some paths to follow. Something like this: