Armin's Weblog

For my final project in Programing A to Z, my last foray into programing in Processing at ITP, I decided to return to my first final project in ICM. I had originally proposed to do two projects for the final but in the end I thought working on this one was more interesting. I took the game I had created before,
Courage vs. Cowardice, and turned it into a new text-based game which I entitled Good vs. Bad. I call this game a Personality Testing Game because the player can receive two outcomes, Good or Bad.

The game very much the same as Courage vs. Cowardice except that the spaceships have been replaced by words. The player flies a fighter on the left side of the screen while words appear and move quickly across the screen from right to left. The player can shoot and destroy the words but this time the player does not shoot a missile but rather the words, "I AM..." The words that appear from the right come in two categories, good adjectives and bad adjectives. Thus when the new "missile" hits a word it briefly forms a sentence such as "I am honest" or "I am wicked."

When a good word is destroyed the player gets a point, When a bad word is destroyed the player loses a point. As before, the player must avoid running into the words (which still follow the Courage vs. Cowardice algorithm) or hitting the buildings on the ground. If that happens the fighter is destroyed and the game is over. Also as before, the sun sets in the background and the screen turns dark as it does. This makes the latter part of the game difficult because the fighter becomes almost invisible in the dark. If the player survives long enough, the game ends and the player is told whether he or she is "good" or "bad" based on the score. The same thing happens if the game ends early with a crash.

This game could easily be expanded. I could envision adding more levels with different words. Perhaps on the next level the question would be, "Are you happy or sad?" The words would then be adjectives for each. What really makes the game interesting is that the player has the opportunity to choose a goal for the ending and then work towards it. But if no goal is chosen, if the player doesn't care whether he or she is good or bad, then the outcome is somewhat random. It all depends on which sentences are created and which words are destroyed.

So in the end the question remains: Are you Good or Bad.

Click Here to Play and Find Out

Posted by Armin Cooper at 08:11 AM | Permalink

For my final in Programming A to Z, I'm going to build two separate projects. The first is a combination of my Midterm project and my RiTa homework assignment. For my Midterm I used words from my manuscript "Being Yourself" to create a text "flyby." The words flew across the screen from left to right over a house and their speed was determined by the amount of times I used them in my manuscript. Words that were used a lot flew through the screen slower than words that weren't used very often.

I determined the number of times I used each word by running a Concordance program in Ellipse. I then manually inputted the data into Processing.

For this Final Project I am going to use the same manuscript but this time I am going to enter it into a RiTa Markov chain as I did for my RiTa homework. The result is that the words become garbled to a certain degree but they still form sentences, just not any sentence I ever wrote in the manuscript. Sometimes, the new sentences don't make much sense but often they come out sounding like a strange form of poetry which I entitled, "Philosophic Poetry" because of their content. In the Final Project, I will allow the user to choose which chapter the sentences come from and then the sentence will scroll across the screen from right to left. The direction of the words is important because the sentences vary in length, some being short and others long. Were I to try to just have them appear right away on screen it would be difficult to make sure they always fit. In addition, the scrolling feature makes each sentence easy to read as it goes by. The user will also have the option of pressing a key to view new sentences either from the same chapter or a different chapter.

For my second Final project, I am going to take an old program I created and change it. The old program was the one I created in Processing for my ICM Final, a game called Courage vs. Cowardice.

Click Here to Play Courage vs. Cowardice
Game Controls:
I = Up
M = Down
F = Fire missile

In this game, the player flies a Stealth Fighter and attempts to shoot down alien spaceships with missiles. The player can only move the fighter up and down as the spaceships appear to fly in from the right. As this is going on, the sun sets in the background and the sky grows dark. If the player can stay alive long enough, the level is completed. The game is called Courage vs. Cowardice because the spaceships randomly move up or down as they get close to the fighter. This has the effect of sometimes making them move away from the fighter (dodging) or move right at the fighter (kamikaze).

For my Programming A to Z Final, I will take the same game and replace the spaceships with words from my manuscript. I will call this new game, Word Fighter. I think this is a perfect way to wrap up or bookend my experience of programming at ITP.

Posted by Armin Cooper at 04:48 PM | Permalink