Into Digital Arts

    Processing is a very powerful set of tools that allow artists, and people who are not particularly experienced with coding, to create works of art utilizing code. It is a very strong tool for getting those interested in the visual design, interested in code. Many schools nowadays use this approach when teaching code, even to computer scientists and engineers. In order to effectively teach coding to someone, they must understand the fact that, what may seem to be, a simple action, is made up of a set of simple small actions. This is essentially what computer programming is. A programmer assembles a set of small rules that, all added together, become something more complex. When using a visual support in teaching programming, the student can see a direct result to a line of code that they add to their program. When with traditional teaching, the only feedback that would be given would be a number in a debugger output, which is much more difficult to understand when first beg...

    As a budding game designer, I have very limited resources available to me when developing a game, either this be time or the amount of work one person can accomplish on their own. One of the design philosophies that people like me can follow is one of minimalism. After reading the scholarly article Towards Minimalist Game Design  I have had some ideas on how to make my games more tangible for one developer to create.     An important observation is in minimalist games that are made by indie developers and can claim wide success. One such game is Undertale, created almost entirely by one developer Toby Fox. This game expresses many of the minimalist design philosophies that are described in the scholarly article, which is the focus of this post. Most primarily, we see the lack of macro-mechanics. This is a primary target when designing a minimalist game as it simplifies development while not necessarily sacrificing depth of play or exploration. The main macr...

    We have finally begun working with P5 in javascript. Today was the first day of just messing around with the library and its different capabilities. I just started by messing with colors and different shapes and making them move across the screen. My first drawing will be posted below, it looks like a fun mess. But that's the best way to find ones way around a new program. Source Code: function   setup () {      createCanvas ( 600 ,  600 );   } var   i  =  0 ;  var   a  =  0 ;  //RGB values to start at  var   r  =  25 ;  var   g  =  255 ;  var   b  =  100 ;  var   reverse  =  true ;     function   draw () {      strokeWeight ( 1 );       background ( r , g , b );      fil...

    There were a number of problems that were brought up in the critique of my game Paper's Dream. The biggest and most adamant of the changes that were brought up was the texturing that I used. It looked very flat and basic, with just minor changes in color, changing these to photo based textures would be very beneficial. So I changed the textures of the trees, leaves, and bushes. This resulted in a much better look overall. The other issue was that when the bird collided with a tree, it would sometimes spin off in a random direction, this was caused because of the different colliders that were on each part of the bird. Changing this to one box colliders for the whole bird object, fixed this issue. I look forward to my future projects in this class.

    The Art of Game Design  continues to be an intriguing read that surprises me in new ways with each chapter. Chapter 6 focuses on the importance that theme has on games and how theme should be treated in a game's design. Theme isn't just something that the player learns from the game, it is the thought or idea that the game should try to represent in every possible way it can. This chapter covers two forms of themes, experienced and resonant themes. Experienced themes are just that, the themes that are experienced by the player through the game's story and setting, however resonant themes are a bit different. Resonant themes are the ones that are below the surface and aren't really experienced but have some deep truth that parallels those truths that the player holds. These are the themes that resonate deeply with players and make a story truly meaningful to a player's core.      To people who do not really play video games, they can be easily seen as a...

    Another project has reached its conclusion. For this project, we were to construct a game all about collecting things. My game is called Paper's Dream  and it is about a paper airplane that wishes to be a bird. The object of the game is to guide the airplane to the feathers around the map, without using all of the flights that are available to the player. This was a great project as it really taught me a bunch about Unity and I am looking forward to the upcoming 2D projects. 

    The Garden of Forking Paths is a story about a testament of a German spy about his attempt to send a notification to his contacts about a secret British weapons cache. In his attempt to reach someone who can pass on his message, he comes to the home of Dr. Stephen Albert. Dr. Albert introduces the main character to a garden, whom the main character believes to be his ancestor's created, "the garden of the forking paths." This garden was never actually physically constructed in the sense that one would expect. What he ended up creating was a novel that had several disconnected story lines, which encompass the idea of bifurcation.  In which, whenever a decision is made by a character, all possible outcomes occur. The novel has a different meaning each and every time it is viewed. More specifically, the novel diverged in time, meaning that time would split resolving in two separate timelines whenever a choice comes along. This is somewhat similar to the infinite universe...

      Psychogeography is a term used to describe a type of exploration, one that emphasizes playfulness and a lazy exploration. This links very strongly to the next big project for my graphic design class. The next project is an interactive work of art where viewers should be able to explore to their heart't content. At its heart. the idea of psychogeography brings forward the thought that art and its surroundings should not be separated, and that they are one in the same. This has the ability to cause confusion in the viewers and corrupt's ones ability to identify where "function" ends and "play" begins. This is very interesting as this is meaning that people are able to "play" without realizing it. This is very important for my upcoming project as the basic idea of it is to allow people to explore. If I want people to enjoy what I create, the goal should be that viewers have fun and even better if they don't realize it until after they have f...