Where we are now! Crazy update!

Hey guys, it's Matt! I thought I'd fill you in on the changes that were made after last quarter... There were quite a few all around!

We've re-assembled our team! Josh and I have taken over full responsibility of the project as Sarah and Brice have moved onto projects of their own. Sarah has decided to take on a brand new project which we will be waiting to hear about! Brice is focusing more on his other team that he had been working with throughout our first quarter. With our Physical Computing Director and Art Director gone, we've had to appoint new responsibilities for each other. Unfortunately though, neither of us create character art or animations!

Of course this meant we would need to find someone to develop to art for our games, but that didn't mean we needed a full-time member on our squad. Therefore over the break we asked our colleagues for help and fortunately we found Alice Savell. Having previously seen her art style, Josh recommended that we give her a shot. It paid off:

On top of that, we've also been considering a completely new feature: Data Visualization. We want to record how many people enter the bathroom, how many people wash their hands, how many people complete the game, and so on. This will give us very interesting statics all running in the background of our game for people to later analyze. How many people do you think wash their hands after using the restroom?

Though this coming quarter looks slightly more daunting with the workload, we are still overly enthusiastic and have a plan to make the most unique interactive experience yet!

The man behind the curtain (Programming)

Matt kicked ass on this project with all the coding he did. Here to join you now is Matt Bone, master processing genius...

Hey guys, here's the scoop on the programming bit from start to finish! Firstly, I'm by no means a programmer (though I thank you for the encouragement, Josh.) From the beginning our four person team lacked a standard programmer, but we all had some experience with Javascript from a previous class we've all taken under the ITGM curriculum. This class used OpenProcessing, so we began our tests using that.

As our game ideas developed, we realized how simply they could be made. Without any reason to move to another program to run the game, I kept building on what was becoming our Alpha. Though I hadn't realized it yet, my methods for creating our game were inadequate for what a professional team should do--as well as inadequate for the class; I wasn't keeping any organized method for documenting my process.

There are several explanations why this occurred, but I'd rather focus on how we're going to manage the programming portion from now on. We will be starting our next quarter with our Alpha build. Following this build, there will be version updates for every bug fix, feature addition, and code clean-up. On the first tab of each OpenProcessing Sketch, there will be a version name and number with a description of the changes made since the previous version.

I hope you enjoy it!

The Artsy Timeline

So the art for the game was left up to Brice and Josh. Brice handled the game level art and concepts while Josh designed the Interface and Platform art.

Brice concepted many different ideas over the course of building the game, here are a few of those concepts:

 

 

Some of these ideas were used, some weren't (fat baby) but all of the concepts helped a lot with our overall art direction.

Josh worked on more technical graphics and interface ideas and came up with the overall platform art and design:

 So there you have it! Some of the awesome art and design implemented into the game. Soon you will get a look into the coding behind it all!

Cameras and Sensors and Rabbits, oh my!

As previously mentioned, Run! is the game we are focusing on for now.

For this game we needed to find a sensor that worked well with our mechanics, meaning that it could basically detect and measure the motion that users' hands give off, take those fluctuations and then change the speed of our character within the game based on those numbers. 

At the beginning of the quarter we were introduced to Leap Motion by our professor. 

Sarah vigorously tested the Leap Motion over the course of the first two weeks. With little result, we contacted an alumni of SCAD that works with that company currently and found that sadly, the Leap Motion could not be used for our needs. 

Sarah then started testing IR sensors with the arduino microprocessor. 

This was also not what we needed because it basically detected motion or no motion, on or off. And because what we need is more complicated than on and off, we marked this sensor off the list.

Also, the radius the IR sensor detected was a bit too large and didn't fit with the sink installation we envisioned for it's use.



But in the end, we found the proper sensor!

Believe it or not, a webcam was all we needed. We stumbled upon a webpage that had an example of what a webcam could do.

Viewing the example:

Because the game is programmed using the Processing language, you must first download processing to run the program.

Visit processing.org to download it, it only takes a minute or two to download!

Once you've downloaded it, click on the image to the left and copy the code from the webpage and paste it into your processing window. Make sure you have a webcam hooked up and hit the play button!

When the program is run, the webcam viewport is displayed with an ellipse at its center. Every time motion is produced, the ellipse changes size. Once we saw this, we knew we could use it. The fact that it detected different levels of motion meant that in our minds, different levels of speed could be produced for our rabbit! Hells yes.

More updates to come!

Game Ideas!

So by now, we've went through various game ideas. I will share some!

Our first idea was going to be the original idea of "Wash your hands, save the princess."

The game would involve the user washing his/her hands to control a rope in the game that pulls the princess upward at a speed controlled by the motion produced, saving her from the antagonist at the bottom of the screen. We scrapped the narrative behind this idea but we still think that the mechanics of it have promise and we plan on making a game like this in the future!

Another idea, with simplicity in mind, was to make a simple puzzle game such as a labyrinth.

Wireframe mock-up

The idea was to wash your hands normally but to slightly adjust your hand position from left to right within the sink to tilt the labyrinth, guiding the ball to the bottom of it to win the game. This idea was an interesting one but it was missing something and seemed somewhat bland.

We even thought of the idea to make it a mouse running through a maze to find the cheese treasure at the end. This was moving into a more interesting direction but was still missing something.

After getting input from classmates and our professor, we decided we were missing some excitement from our game ideas and possibly the relevance to them.

Thus, Run! was born!

The goal in Run! is to escape an enemy that's chasing you across the screen. We've decided to make the main character a rabbit that is running from a huge bolder quickly gaining on him. To escape the boulder, the user must wash their hands quickly to make the rabbit run faster and faster! If the user doesn't wash their hands fast enough the rabbit slows down to a jog and the boulder comes that much closer to getting him!

We think that when compared to a puzzle game, this game idea is way more exciting and graphically pleasing. Escaping and enemy also adds to the excitement giving the player a sense of duty, to save the poor rabbit from a horrible end.

There was also much thought about the rabbit being the main character. We wanted to make the game appeal to both male and female players as those are the two main types of bathrooms. In our minds, making the character a rabbit will allow both genders to enjoy the game equally as opposed to making the character a man or woman. Yay for unisex rabbit!

This is now the game we are focusing on and will update you with in the future posts.

Where do we start?

Our goal with this project above all else, is to show everyone that being clean and healthy doesn't have to be such a bland, mundane task as it always has been.

With this in mind, we hope to build a platform that does not bore the user with health facts about washing their hands but instead tricks them into completing the hand washing process in the healthiest way possible while secretly completing each step of the CDC hand washing guidelines.

To do this, the games must first be fun. To us, it won't take much to do this because in the mind of the user, seeing a game appear behind a mirror that's played by washing your hands will get even the most unhealthy person curious to try it.

Inside this fun game we will attempt to use the screen graphics and interface to take the user through each CDC handwashing step without them even knowing it.

The CDC handwashing steps we are following can be found here.

After we find a good direction with these ideas, we are hoping to one day make a kit that can be installed in any bathroom that occupies a monitor behind its mirror.(airports, hospitals, etc..)

Example of long-term goal.

But for now we will concentrate on making an in-class interactive installation displaying all the aspects of the game that I previously listed. We are very excited!

Team Update!

Matt is working on some code to get our main mechanics down using placeholder graphics. Josh is working on the interactive steps users will need to take to play the game. He is also working on the first game idea which Brice will be concepting art for. Sarah is introducing herself to Leap Motion which we may use as our main sensor.

More updates to come!

Welcome to Project Oasis!

Hello and welcome to the Project Oasis blog! This will be your main source of information in regards to Project Oasis and its games.

This is our starting line-up:

Matt Bone - Programmer, Technical Director
Josh Mullis - Game Designer, Interface Designer
Sarah Wilson - Physical Computing Director
Brice Patterson - Art Director

So let me explain the project...

Oasis is a new platform that we think could change washing hands forever. The physical unit would be placed in a bathroom and consist of a screen/monitor behind the mirror, and a sensor of some kind in or around the sink to pick up hand motion.

The gaming side of things is very simple, as it needs to be. Games will be played and displayed behind the mirror as you wash your hands. You control the game by your hand motion in the sink. Simply put, the factors that matter most in playing a game are the intensity of your hand washing motion and the length of time you create that motion!

But let us not forget that this project sparked from one simple idea, "Wash your hands, save the princess." The idea was to think of a way to make people want to wash their hands and wash them right and we hope to accomplish this goal.

I will be blogging with more updates later, but in the meantime feel free to check out our other classmates' video game blogs! There are some really cool ideas here! Seeya soon!

Project Bala: http://projectbala.blogspot.com

Project Grind: http://thegrindgame.blogspot.com

Project Dissonance: http://dissonanceproject.blogspot.com/

Project Oasis: http://interactiveoasis.blogspot.com/