Curious thing of the week- Curious Displays

http://kotaku.com/5477917/what-life-as-a-sim-might-look-like

Curious displays is a graduate thesis piece produced by Julia Yu Tsao. It takes the ideas of using half inch blocks that float around and act as a form of reminder about different things, sort of a free floating diary or calendar. The block diary it appears can receive updates about appointments or meetings that have been changed and update you about it. As an idea I think its pretty amazing, however we are nowhere near the technological ability yet to create it, unless done digitally or projected. As a concept though it really works and would ensure we no longer have that issue where we lose the remote down the side of the sofa!

Visual Essay- 2K games first look

Interactive media- Quiz menu idea

Menu Idea 1- Interactive media by ~XxXRawrberryXxX on deviantART

This is a menu idea I have been playing around with on Flash. It makes extensive use of motion tweening to give it a bit more variety then just a bunch of still slides. For the final piece I will change the colours about (I used black and white for the test based on their contrast) The final one will also have questions after the menu (obviously!) so that it actually resembles something along the lines of a quiz! Overall I'am pretty happy with how this has turned out, and with a few tweaks it could look really good. Guess this just goes to show that anyone can learn Flash, as long as they can make it past the initial WTF is going on moments!

Context 1 practitioners- 2K games

2K games has to be my favourite games developer currently. With games such as Borderlands and Bioshock 2 under their belt they are at the forefront of games design. Borderlands takes the basis of an RPG (role playing game) and speeds it up by mixing it with an FPS (First person shooter). The biggest hook on this games is the way the creators have animated the environments, characters and weapons. They have used cell shading to really give the game a different feel, and in my opinion it really works! The RPG element and sandbox nature of the environments really help to keep gamers interested, with randomly spawned enemies and the ability to level up and customize your characters skills being another hook. Bioshock 2 is the latest title to be released by this legend of a company, and as I said in my previous post about it, this game resonates with me on a massive scale. Again a lot of thought and time has been put into the character and environments, really playing on the run down nature of post first game rapture. I'am using 2K games as one of my practitioners in my context 1 visual essay as they are by fa my favourite games developer and influence a lot of my designs, ideas and thoughts.

Looking at flash quizzes...Inspiration!

http://www.notdoppler.com/theimpossiblequiz.php

This link leads to the infamous Impossible Quiz, a flash game that probably every procrastinating student throughout school and university has played or at least heard of. This, in my opinion is simply down to its addicting play style. You have just over a 100 questions thrown at you one after the other, until you either run out of lives or complete it. Most of the questions are clever plays on words or use pictures as the questions. The reason its addictive is because it so fast paced, you always want to get to the next question, but often die before you get there. It plays heavily on the learn from your mistakes way of completing a quiz, meaning you will always go back because you learn the answer for a question and thus can get through it quickly to questions you haven't done before. It also uses bright colours and simple music to tie in with the theme of the game, a simple quick way to waste a bit of time when you should really be concentrating on something more important.

Design practice 2- Interactive media issues

Well once again Flash is causing me problems. In the seminar I was able to create two buttons that upon being clicked glowed wither red or green. I was going to use this to indicate a wrong or right answer in my quiz. However once I got back home I have found that it doesn't work for some reason on my laptop or any of my friends. I have used the same code and everything but obviously something is different, and Flash being Flash could mean it cud be any tiny ting hidden amongst the lines of code. Once I have figured it out I will put it on here to allow you to have a go.

2K games and Bioshock 2- a game for those liberal people out there

Ok so as a few of you may know I am a bit of a games nut, and accordingly I follow loads of games companies on facebook and the like. Anyhow the big story in the line at the moment is the imminent release of Bioshock 2. For those of you who don't know it is the sequel to the first game (obviously) and takes place in the city of Rapture. Rapture is the brainchild of Andrew Ryan, a liberal man who builds a city on the bottom of the ocean. The reason for this? By building his city at the bottom of the ocean he has created a haven for all the liberal people who are tired of their governments oppression. In his own words "A place where the artists will not fear the censor". This is an idea that has meaning to me, not the whole building a city underwater part, but the idea of having a place where the artist has no need to fear censorship, where freedom of speech and the freedom to view what you want is available, not just talked about. People may claim to be liberal with their thoughts and ideas and governments may say they are more understanding but there is still so much that we are never told and are not allowed to see. In the city of Rapture there is no censorship, there is no god, there is only freedom. The second game has you returning to this utopia of free speech and expression, this time as a Big daddy, Raptures diving suit clad protectors and hunters. This is a step away from the original game that had you playing a brainwashed man sent to kill Raptures creator. The visuals are still incredible, with Rapture being bought to life with next generation graphics. The platforms such as the PS3 really help to bring this fictional city to life, allowing you to get a feel for it. Granted the city is very run down ever since everything went wrong, with plasmids (gene replacements that give the users powers such as fire or lightning) the populace went mad and started to regress, becoming horrible, twisted parodies of their former selves. Now these splicers as they are called have regressed to new lows and stalk around Rapture in a perpetual hunt. As the protector it is your job to rid the place of them. In doing this you get to explore what remains of a true liberal paradise, and thus see the aftermath of what happened to Rapture and its citizens. I'm massively excited about this game and cant wait to play it. Release date is the 9th of February and I will certainly be at the front of the queue to get it. I will also write another post about Bioshock 2 once I play it, looking more into the character models and environments.