D.I.S.C.O.

After playing about with Photoshop and Illustrator I created this simple 70's inspired disco girl image.

New online signature

Just wanted to play about with my online signature, I always sign off texts or e-mails to friends and family with just J!, a capital J and an exclamation mark, I also like the colour scheme on my website, as mentioned before, red, whites and blacks. Combining these elements with simple shapes, like the triangles which already exist on my website, I have created these basic ideas to follow up on, and create a mark which instantly makes me recognisable.

Thermal WiFi Union Street

Using the hertzian space visualisation I created of Union Street, using a WiFi enabled phone, as a basis and guide, I have created this image mixing the thermal imaging technique to represent the WiFi hotspots. The areas of red are where the signals are strong, and the white bright areas are where the signals are most concentrated. The reverse is also true with the blues and greens being the weaker edges of the signals.

Flash game revisited

Having now had a chance to test my game online, I have concluded that I would make a few small changes. The main change I would make would be to turn the static duck images into animated clips to make the game look better. Other changes I would make would be to make the sound clips finish once the reset button is clicked to take the player back to the start screen, and when the game switches to its night mode at 7pm I would like the title screen to change to represent this, with that game screen having a small red laser dot image for the targeting, rather than the same crosshairs. However, overall I am very pleased with the finished product as it is and don’t believe that these small changes would effect the game play.

Flash game final version

Having tested my game with a few people I have decided to make further alterations. The biggest change was to add a timer, like I previously questioned, this firstly made the game harder, as setting a time limit forced the player to make quicker judgements, and therefore miss more often. To combat this I decided to add a choice of difficulty levels, which was achieved simply by passing different values to the variables which allocate the time and shot allowances. However by adding at timer and difficulty setting I affected various other game play mechanics. A small problem was now physical space on the title screen, where I had one button and a description before, I now needed two and a substantially longer explanation, so to get around this I added a third button which sends the player to the rules section, leaving the main title page free of clutter.

A bigger problem though, was the fact that the game now had three possible outcomes, win, loose through lack of time, or loose through lack of ammo. This meant dragging different parts to the stage based on numerous conditions being met, leaving my code being full of ‘if’ and ‘else’ statements, and weird values being passed to variables to try and stop one code interfering with another. I feel that I achieved my goal, but have produced a mass of code which given more time and a better skill set, I am sure could be shortened.

To introduce an outside factor into my game, I found to be a real challenge. This wasn’t because of a lack of skills, it was purely down to a lack of ideas. I wanted the factor to be something meaningful to the game, so having a news headline feed, or the equivalent, on the title page would have been useless. Instead I decided to use the computers clock to get a rough time scale based on the hours count, and if it was passed 7pm the hunting would take place in the dark. Below is a screen shot of the game during the day, you shot ducks and they explode, however below that is a screen shot taken between 7pm and midnight. As you can see there is a new backdrop which has been called in, to replicate the night sky, and now if you shoot the ducks they turn into devil and angel duck ghosts, with a spooky sound effect. This doesn’t change the basic game play, but is a way of using an outside source to change the game slightly, whilst still being true to itself. And finally, yes the tractor is now animated during daytime play.

GPS tracker art

This new phenomenon of tracking with GPS markers, then noting the path and transforming them into a work of art, can be seen as an interesting exercise in mapping the ‘natural flow of life’, but can also be manipulated to create a conscious perception of art, like the picture below.

Using a GPS enabled device in conjunction with ‘Google maps’, we set ourselves a few simple rules to follow whilst walking around the city centre, then I mapped the results with my unique interpretation. The rules we followed were to firstly follow a group (3 or more) of male young adults, then change to a group of mixed young adults when their path intersects ours, and then swap to a group of female young adults when their path intersects ours, before going back to the beginning using the same rules.

Below is a basic map with our GPS locations dotted on, and also my take on the findings using a graffiti/modern art look to show the paths as we were in a city centre following youths, and I believed these two ideas could be represented with that iconic style. I also slightly extended the paths to show the direction the groups were heading before we changed direction. I used blue for boys, red for girls, and yellow for mixed groups. I also used a 3D effect with the slight differences in height representing the different group sizes.

Hertzian space

My understanding of hertzian space is that it consists of all the ‘real’ things/objects which happen outside of human perception, i.e. radio signals obviously exist physically, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to pickup radio stations, but we can not see them in the air all around us without a device that can pickup the signals we can not with our senses. This space operates with both natural and man made inputs, and can be used or interacted with in many ways.

Using Union Street as our location we used a Wi-Fi enabled phone to pick out one aspect of this hertzian space, i.e. Wi-Fi signals and strengths. The diagram below is my representation of this exercise, it shows the strength of signal by using different size and coloured circles, green and large are strong connections, red and small are weaker, these are given the name of the connection (therefore showing each signal has a unique identity, and it doesn’t just exist as one object) and also shows whether the connection is secure or not, denoted with a padlock image. I found this interesting as it shows points where you can interact with this entity.