Project 2: Transformation Final

The life of a Bellboy

I had a lot of fun working on this project and I hope it shows in the final product. My interpretation of the idea of 'transformation' was fairly straightforward; that is, an object going from one state to another. The original concept had its merits as a somewhat light-hearted, digital Milgram experiment, but would've been far too linear with the 'instructor' character holding hands with the user and taking them through the interactions step by step. Even though I intended the interactions to all be available from the get go, it would be easy to predict that users would not attempt to experiment with the application if there was someone there telling them what they can do.

In changing from my original idea, then known as Sadism Code, to the current Bellboy, I found it difficult to justify the inclusion of that second 'instructor' character and opted to leave it out. I felt, after taking feedback from my tutors during the interim presentation, the instructor's role had become obsolete after the design decision to push the abstraction of the application and not have any textual instruction be present.

To get this abstraction thing going I decided to take on a very minimalist style and have the user's imagination do most of the work. To do this, there needed to be an overhaul in the design of my 'interactee', taking away the obviously 'human' characteristics of it while still trying to maintain a personality to it. I decided to change the shape from a white square with a distinct face and mouth to the current black circle with only white 'eyes', since circles strike me as more personable shapes than squares. That the two little white circle are eyes may not be immediately clear to users until they mouseover the Bellboy and see him transform and I intend the revelation of human characteristics in what is essentially just a geometric shape to surprise users and (hopefully) create a bond between them and the character.

Lacking a mouth, I felt it would be inappropriate to have the interactee speak and make human noises, which was my first idea and which my new direction compelled me to avoid. I trialed various different soundsets, starting with human noises made with a closed mouth, but none were satisfying and I put it off for later. After adding a 'tickle' code to my application, I noticed that holding the Bellboy caused only the 'cheeks' to move and immediately thought of the sound of jingling bells. Searching some public domain sources, I found a sound that fit the shape and the movement perfectly and built the rest of the soundset from there. The name came to me at this time as well.

Soon after this, I realised that my old brute coding wasn't going to get me very far in realising my vision and began research on utilising PVector. After converting what I could of my old code to fit in the more advanced class-based programming format, progress became a lot faster and I could divert most of my time then to exploring how to improve visual and audio feedback and the general experience of playing with the application. After becoming satisfied with the look and feel of things, I then returned to my original idea of having bad things able to happen to the Bellboy, and figured out how to use total velocity as a trigger for his transformation to a 'hurt' state. To make it clear that such a change was possible, I tried applying reverse psychology in the description on the Open Processing page and even in a short note before the code itself, though I suspect that the relative difficulty in getting a good long mouse motion in the 500x500 area will make it hard for people not actively seeking to abuse the Bellboy. Unfortunately, I was unaware that we were constained to an area limit and originally coded this for an 800x800 area where you can get a good wind up to throw the Bellboy and lowering the total velocity trigger any further makes it far too easy to hurt him.

To top the code off, I added a climactic 'death' for the Bellboy. It's amazing, because just today I showed the code to another student and let her play around with it and when the Bellboy died she actually apologised to me repeatedly as if she had broken my application or something! Though such a response may be a one off sort of thing and highly dependent on the user's personality, it was exactly this sort of emotional resonance with the character that I hoped my design decisions would help create.

All in all, this project was a blast and I'm very proud of the finished design. I like it so much, I'll probably continue to tweak and add to it after I learn more since it's fun and it always seems like more can be done with it.