Final Proposal
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.