Project #7 GET IT DONE!

Project Proposal

I want to make a game that can reflect something that has happened recently in my life. However, I do not want the game to be a serious adaptation. I want to have a game that feels whimsical and can make my players chuckle while playing. Since I just learned how to use voice recognition in p5.js., I really want to incorporate voice command into my game as one of the main interactions. I think letting the players use their voices to interact with the game will definitely add another layer of intuitiveness. I imagine it will be so much more interesting and experiential than only having the players input with mouse and keyboard since I think mouse and keyboard only provide a very robotic interaction which can take away lots of the whimsical quality of my game.

Storyboard

Description

Essentially, this is a reaction game, and you are playing as my laptop. You are observing me through the front-facing camera of my laptop. When you see me procrastinating and not writing my paper, you have to shout at me to stop my procrastination so that I can finish writing the essay before a time limit. For example, when you see me gaming, simply say, "No Gaming!" and I will stop gaming and go back to writing. The goal is to keep the time I spend procrastinating minimal so that I can finish the paper as soon as possible and sleep early that night.

Reflection

The ideation phase of the game was relatively quick. I have a clear goal in mind: to make a game that feels unorthodox compared to a "normal" "WASD" walking game. I developed the storyline and the looks within the first week of this assignment. However, the journey of transferring certain interactions and effects from my imagination into p5 codes was extremely difficult. From the most simple task of creating a randomized image-swapping machine to a more complex interaction of performing feedback for detected voice inputs, nothing was easy. Whenever I thought I understood the logic and got the code correct, I was really excited to run the game. Unfortunately, in 99 out of 100 cases, I would receive something that was totally bugged. So I just kept trying different things, such as adding a "=" here, putting an "else if" there, or moving a statement from function setup() to function draw(). However, I rarely saw my attempts succeed. Sometimes, I could spend an entire day trying to make my game perform a very basic action, and I would still be stuck at the same place by the end of that day. I did ask my classmates and tutors for help, and they could often solve my problems very quickly by simply pointing out that I should've used ">=" instead of "==" in a part of the code. This made me even more frustrated since I spent so much time trying so many different solutions and failed to find the answer. Moreover, the answer often appeared to be some very random things that I couldn't figure out why they were there. By the end of this assignment, I felt very lost and exhausted. I couldn't distinguish what was correct or wrong to put into a code. I felt that if I was lucky, anything I wrote could execute perfectly. If I am unlucky, everything I wrote could be a bug, no matter how hard I tried to fix it. Coding to me felt so random and unpredictable.