GAMES AND SOUND
iOS Game: Light and Dark
I created an iPhone game that I wrote in Swift. The game is inspired from the classic 2-D shooter Einhander. While retaining some of the design features of a classic shooter like scrolling background, various stages, and enemy AI, I also designed and implemented my own unique ideas. The player ship cannot shoot back at the enemy ships, only the enemies have the right to shoot. The player must also focus on toggling shield color in order to avoid collision with the white or black barrier bars scrolling through with the background. The game also increases in speed at the completion of each Stage. Enemy AI position and barrier color are calculated at random. I purposely used two player focus driven game mechanics, color toggling and enemy evasion, as a way to study how different people prioritize multiple gameplay mechanics. As a result, I have noticed that most players focus on evasion over color toggling. This game allowed my to explore player focus in games in an interesting and unique way.
Interactive Sound Generator (proof of concept)
This project is a proof of concept I created to demonstrate a different kind of interactive instrument. I utilized my pre-recorded notes (various modes and scales) with chords that accompany the notes. The Kinect was used as the interactive interface. I used raw depth data and created a point tracking system for each hand. This point tracking is used to calculate collision with the coordinates specified on the screen. Also, the depth data was used to describe an effective range, meaning the program will only work if the user is within a certain distance from the Kinect. The shapes I chose to be represented by arcs were carefully created to reflect the nature of the notes. The shapes reflected the pattern of the notes: the raising or lower in pitch, or how the series of notes looped back to the first note. The project allowed the users to intuitively play and guess what note is next in the pattern without realizing what specific note they are playing. Overall, this project provides non-musicians with a way to play music without having to learn an instrument.