Ollie Holmwood's Blog

App done and tested

Ollie Holmwood — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:25:43 BST

Well I've been working away in Flash and Mediascape to put together my GPS narrative app. Having got the story and individual clues written out, I first applied the clue numbers to particular areas of the map, wrote an array of strings to hold the text for the clues, and linked these to the numbered areas on the map. So when you access a particular numbered spot in Plymouth, it triggers that text clue to pop up onscreen. A new array is built up based on the order in which you find the clues, and this is displayed as clickable icons on the screen, so you can revisit any clue at any time to refresh your memory. Screenshots: The top screenshot depicts the title screen, which shows until you enter the large start area, at the hoe. At that point, the intro will pop up as your first clue. The second screenshot lists all the previous clues and is scrollable. It only scrolls as far as you've collected, so there is no indication of just how many clues there are. The third screenshot shows a clue pop up window, which is scrollable. I went out to the Hoe yesterday to give it a quick trial with a borrowed iPAQ. It ran a little bit slowly, but for the most part, worked well. All of the access regions that I tested seemed to work and the application behaved as it does in the desktop testing environment. I tried to take video footage of it on-screen, but outside, it was impossible to really see anything on there at all, so I cancelled that idea in the end.

Lost the plot?

Ollie Holmwood — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 14:38:27 BST

Having decided to focus my efforts on a plot that is explained by picking up clues using GPS, I've been throwing ideas around on paper and gradually building up a reasonably complex conspiracy/science fiction style plot that is full of red herrings and alternate explanations for certain events. I want each user's understanding of what happened to be different depending on the route they take around the area. The format it will take will be mostly text-based, though if I have time, I'd like to maybe add some small illustrations too, to make it a bit more interesting. When you encounter a clue, a sound will go off in the application, and a window will pop up containing the appropriate clue. You'll be able to scroll through a list of all the clues you've collected and open up a previous one to check again, if necessary. An important point is that the list shouldn't give any indication of the actual order of the clues, or how many there are out there, as this encourages the user to complete the collection. They need to be encouraged to end their story only when they are satisfied that all loose ends are explained, whether or not there are more secrets that they could have uncovered. Since I'm not particularly planning on releasing it to the public as an application in its own right, I'll deliver a summary of the whole plot in this post, through the clues that I'm using. In a sense, there IS a linear narrative to the whole thing, but the idea is that the user takes parts of that narrative and constructs their own.. You take the role of the character, Dan Foster, whom we initially know very little about. When you begin the application, you wake up by the Hoe, at dawn, covered in bruises and bloodied, and you can't remember anything that happened, why you're there or even your own name. Go down the promenade to the left and you'll find a series of blood drops and tyre skid marks that lead you to the coast, where you spot a car in the water. If you went to the right, you would find your identity badge, with your name and occupation as an agent for something called IronLabs, a government agency, and a broken needle used to administer an odd blue liquid. Back to the car, and you investigate its contents to find three men inside, brutally killed, the front edge of the roof having been ripped off. One of the guys has an odd, purple discolouration to their wrist and there is mysterious black ooze everywhere. An alien attack? A super-human? A were-wolf? You?.. Consider the possibilities. You also find a briefcase, but cannot open it as it is locked. You keep hearing people's conversations and random sounds that are happening several metres away, yet your ears momentarily pick them up, along with deafening distortion. You also find more black ooze lying around in certain places. At a couple of points, police cars will rush past, and if this happens, your access to the car would be blocked if you haven't already visited it, because the police would have gotten to it first, and you never would have picked up the briefcase. You might find a mobile phone that contains a four digit code, and if you did get the briefcase, you'll be able to open up a report on a mysterious "Species X", whose attributes include increased speed and jump height, extremely brutal strength, a purple, veiny skin discolouration and super hearing/sight, but temporary and minor traces of these abilities are often "contagious" to regular humans. Eventually, you might find your own mobile phone. The leader of a group called "The resistance" phones you, telling you that you escaped from IronLabs because you know their secrets - they harbour and experiment on alien life forms and now wish to hunt you down and silence you. They are an organisation set up to oppose them, and wish to meet with you at the sundial on Armada Way. If you go there without having been to the car crash, you are shot dead by a sniper... if you did see the car crash, you alert yourself to certain individual who was watching you, and has killed the sniper for you. His voice appears in your ear, beckoning you to meet him and leaves you with an interesting revelation when he asks that you simply pull up your sleeve. You find that your arm is purple and veiny! When you meet the mysterious character, whose whole body and face are covered, he explains how you were both human modification experiments at the hands of IronLabs and that he is a full embodiment of "Species X", whereas you are only a partially formed specimen. You have both been on the run for some time, and the agency wish to kidnap and bring you back, as they attempted to last night. The character's aggression saw to that, but he cannot explain why the resistance are after you. A government report you find elsewhere specifies that you had already met with them weeks ago, and suggests that they may fear that you will be prepared to go to IronLabs with information about their names and whereabouts. -- As you can see, there are many facets, and it's difficult to find all the answers. Even if you do, it's still left fairly open as to whether Dan is an experimented super human or merely someone who works for the agency, saw something he shouldn't have, and caught mild versions of the abilities like a contagious bug. If I had more time I would want to make it even more complex, but I think this is quite a good example of the clue system for "hiding" parts of a narrative. Some workbook scans:

GPS Narrative Research

Ollie Holmwood — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:25:26 BST

Some more research I've recently collected into GPS technology with narrative, and sources of inspiration. Hopstory Hopstory consists of plotlines of four fictional characters, set within the old Guinness Hopstore building of Dublin. Story fragments are distributed around the building, according to where they happened, and at the end, the story fragments can be replayed and edited by users to create a personalised story. This Rhizome description also offers some interesting historical context about relating the idea to religious habits of displaying a story in pictures across the interior walls of a church or building, thereby making that architectural space into a medium for storytelling. This is very much the same idea of what I wish to do, but I plan to actually use the advantages the physical space has to offer to break the boundaries of linearity, very much putting the user in control, both blindly in the way that they must randomly search the location for story fragments, and intellectually, in that they must use their thoughts and ideas to create their own connections between the fragments. Location33 A Location-based game/narrative that allows users in the Culver City area (near Los Angeles) to connect their mobile devices to 20 different nodes throughout the free Wi-fi cloud in the city. Each node gives them a fragment of a song/story that they can remix and re-order with others as they wish to create a more interactive experience. Again, a similar idea that emphasises the interactivity and need to go and find all of the samples to make your piece even bigger. Janet Cardiff: The Missing Voice I've experienced this project myself during the first year London trip. As you walk through various streets of the city, you are guided with an audio tour, as a voice narrates the journey, complete with background sounds that you're not sure are part of the recording, or actually happening around you. It's a very affective way of applying a narrative to a physical space, albeit a linear route. With more time, I would like to be able to add audio and speach into my own work to match that atmosphere, but I think at this point it's best to stick to text - I don't have any good voice actors handy! Holly's Inbox A source of reference for my blog idea, I feel that it's also appropriate for this in the way that some of the full story is masked from you. You only gather the narrative from what the characters are communicating to each other, and the description of what happens can only be limited to conversation, and not a third person description. Somewhat similar to the way in which the full story in my GPS application will be masked from view, only accessible through certain clues, and through the perspective of the main character. It could possibly be something that compells the reader to explore further, attempting to gain as much information as possible.

Ok, getting somewhere

Ollie Holmwood — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:43:05 BST

Last post I was having difficulties settling on a new idea for my negotiated project. I've since been able to round off an idea that I think I'll be happy with. It takes the principle of creating an interactive narrative in the form of a blog, but applies an entirely different medium to it - in this case, mobile devices and GPS applications. I plan to explore the possibilities of allowing the user the opportunity to construct their own narrative, based on pieces of information or "clues" supplied to them by the application. The order of finding and selection of these clues will lead them to build up their own version of the story, according to the evidence that they find - there is no set, linear ending to the story as such, it ends whenever the user is satisfied that the story they have pieced together is the "truth". The idea I have to illustrate this at the moment is the user takes the role of a character suffering from amnesia, waking to find himself beaten up. Using a mobile device, the user can explore the area (in this case, Plymouth city center), and find objects (pop-up explanations within the application when the user enters a particular region) that would offer a small clue as to what may have happened to the character. In truth, there are several different possibilities, or main conclusions that could be drawn, and some clues will lead towards one conclusion, others to another one. For example, one conclusion may be that he was left for dead by government agents because he knows a secret, or maybe another one was that he was attacked by aliens. If the user has found quite a lot of clues towards a certain conclusion, the character may actually miss clues to others because they become convinced of this one particular storyline. Keeping an open mind by collecting many varied clues makes for a more complex explanation. The idea is that the user pieces the clues together themself to draw their own conclusion about what happened to the character, as they attempt to offer a universal explanation that covers all the clues they've found. If they can't come up with one, they keep going, to try and find more. It's a response to traditional linear narrative that has a definite beginning, middle and end. In the case of a murder mystery story or drama serials like Lost or Heroes, for example, the clues are presented in a specific order one after the other, there's only one, true conclusion at the very end that you have to reach, and until then, you can only guess the outcome. Here, those guesses become the story, and it progresses at your own pace, only finishing when you are satisfied with your explanation. You control where the character goes and what clues he finds, leading to a very individual, multi-layered narrative. I realised it's a similar principle to dadaism in this way, in the anarchic desire to remove meaning and structure. I saw Dadaism as a starting point today, and built up my idea having been influenced by the following observations. Reference 3 below explains how Dadaist poems would be made up of words from a paragraph in a newspaper or other source, cut up and arranged in a random order to form a new poem. That's pretty much what I'm allowing the user to do here, by giving them different parts of the story, in an order that they unwittingly define. Reference 1 also points out that dadaism forces the reader to think; "It was using coarse harsh words (including swear words) to conceive a random notion that makes the reader have to think while reading it to get across the excessive ramblings." Parallels with my idea to force the user to think about how the story fits together. The difference is that while dadaism attempts to disrupt traditional concepts of art and any kind of coherent structure, the theme of my project so far has really been all about allowing the user some level of significant control over the events of a narrative, yet still maintaining that coherence of a well organised sequence. More references to things and story ideas soon. Dada references.. (1) http://www.geocities.com/allon_art/dadapoetry.html (2) TzaraDADAmanifesto.pdf - from the IDAT203 Reading/Revision section of the UOP student portal. (3) OTHER WAYS OF MAKING POEMS.doc - from the IDAT203 Reading/Revision section of the UOP student portal.

IDAT202 Game progress

Ollie Holmwood — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:59:14 GMT

Been making progress on our e-learning game over the last week, and I've uploaded what we have so far: E-learning game: Early version Might have to fullscreen it in order to avoid it looking a bit funny at a smaller size. It's 1024 x 768 at the moment. This constitutes about a week's work. Ken's sprites have been fully integrated and the character can be rotated and told to walk a certain distance by inputting the values. He collides with walls and loses health when he runs into the enemy. He also fires arrows with the spacebar, which can destroy the enemy, and pick up arrow and health items. May be one or two glitches with the movement system at this stage, and there's a few things I'll have to iron out there if I get time. So essentially, the basics are there, it's just a matter of building a series of different rooms, and throwing in new enemies and obstacles. I also need to start working on the shape-drawing system, whereby the user must input the appropriate degrees to link to different points, so that the hero draws a certain shape around a batch of enemies to destroy them. Ken's working on some more sprites, including animation cells for enemies, aesthetic touches like torches, and other obstacles. So far so good, I'd say.

Negotiated Project.. where to go?

Ollie Holmwood — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:23:53 GMT

I must admit, I'm stuck. And have been stuck for a few weeks now, and have kind of been putting off this project, but now I have to face that it won't go away, so I need to come up with something. Not that I've done nothing at all, of course. Initially I was planning on investigating the idea of narrative blogging. Take the normally factual and diary-esque nature of a blog and give it to a completely fictional character as a way of telling a story, in which that character is the protagonist. I've always liked the idea, but I've constantly been in turmoil as to whether I could really pull it off or not, not having really written a story since GCSE English. I presented the idea to Joasia and Geoff as part of the interim presentations a few weeks ago, and their own concerns left me feeling that it's a project probably not worth doing. The general impression I got is that it's not really an original enough idea and I don't think they were convinced about how reader comments could influence the direction of the story by their direct interaction with the character. I don't think that necessarily means that that project would fail, but generally I just don't have much enthusiasm anymore, for it, or my ability to write it. After my success with GPS in the IDAT204 project, Chris suggested I incorporate the skills I learned there into my negotiated project. This seemed like a good idea to me, and I wondered how a narrative could be played out in a GPS application. It should allow for a very non-linear experience as you could alter the direction of the narrative depending on where you go. I do wonder if it's a truly original idea though as GPS games and experiments are becoming more and more common, plus I'd still have to write a narrative. I'm still leaving the idea open, but for another one I'm moving away from narrative, but sticking to the idea of a character who exists on the internet. I've been thinking about online personas and how the internet allows us to wear certain masks over our behaviour, personality and appearance, whereas in real life, social conventions and interactions prevent us from having that same amount of control. On instant messenger conversations, or forum posts for example, I personally find I may talk to people differently online than I do in real life. As someone who is quite shy around new people, I find online interaction to be a great opportunity to gather thoughts and express them exactly as I want, in my own time, and without fear of the reactions of others because I may not know them personally, and therefore it offers a shield of anonymity. I can be someone who appears to know what they're talking about instead of someone who might have the ideas, but a lack of ability to fully express themselves verbally in certain situations. Also this idea of avatars - the personality or appearance that people create in an online space such as Second Life or World of Warcraft. Is there a correlation between people creating a radically different appearance for themselves online, and a need to escape reality in some way? I kind of thing there's something in these ideas, but what, I don't know. The only thing I can come up with is some kind of dynamic website where users can share these different personas they have (maybe on one forum or online space they act in one way, and another they act differently), and bring them together to create a spectrum that fully represents them as a whole. Removing the masks by combining the unmasked bits of their online representations. If that makes sense. Doesn't strike me as an amazing concept though. So what I'm basically left with in these GPS and avatar ideas is an application without a concept and a concept without an application, respectively.. Maybe I can combine the two somehow. Meanwhile I could gain inspiration from my essay and do something that comments on Web 2.0 culture, but I don't know what that could be. I hate this project, to be honest. I understand the reasoning behind getting us to come with an original idea, but in this day and age of online contributions, every idea has been done. And frankly, I'm not that interested in coming up with a single, completely fresh idea for something. I'm realising lately that I'm a technician, not a conceptualist. Give me Photoshop or Actionscript and I can make something cool, but give me a completely blank canvas for fresh ideas, and I'm stuck.

Turin!

Ollie Holmwood — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:39:37 GMT

Recently got back from our big second year international trip to Turin, which was great fun. We went to the Share festival, which was a bit smaller than I was expecting it to be with only about five or six installations, but they were good ones! Still, you kind of go away thinking that with a bit of hard work and a little learning of certain technologies, you could probably make some of that stuff yourself. We did a lot of walking and saw a lot of sites. My favourite was probably just the view you got at the top of the film museum, which was a massive tower that you could take a lift up to and overlook the entire, sprawling city. We liked it so much, we returned at sunset to get some great photos.. Check out all of the shots at my Flickr account I've also YouTubed a few of the installations at the festival.. This was "Delicate Boundaries" by Christine Sugrue, and kind of reminded me of mine and Vicky's organism, mixed in with the organisms of certain others for that project. The little bugs follow your finger around the screen, then can wander off of it onto your arm by way of a projector. Very clever, and won the prize, I believe. "Virtual Identity Process" by D3D, which asked for a name to be inputted, and then a visualisation on the table is created based on the google image search results from that name. You can then drag around the various results with your finger. Looked really cool, but I'm not sure what it was really supposed to do other than that. This was very cool. "Knife.Hand.Chop.Bot" by Emanuel Andel. A knife is stabbed on the table multiple times between the fingers of the users spread out hand. The machine can identify the fingers and measure how much they're sweating, and the more they sweat the faster it goes. Brilliant idea, but must have been nerve-racking to test for the first time, without a dummy hand. I think everyone really enjoyed themselves out there - and we got to see Hugo completely hammered too! Oh well, back to work now I guess. I have a shitload to do over easter. :(

All set for tomorrow

Ollie Holmwood — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:24:30 GMT

With the presentation tomorrow, my GPS Phototrail/Seagull Hunt game is more or less as ready as it will ever be. Well, I guess there was always room for more testing, but I'm very happy with it. A fair bit has happened on it since my last post actually. I went with the seagull idea, whereby a particularly evil gull has stolen your coursework. In the game, he will hide in various places on the campus, and you're provided with a photo to the current location. The closer you get, the more your radar goes off and an image of the gull appears on the screen. When you get there, he flies away to the next place. The time limit is determined by the distance between the last point and the next and if you don't make it, he'll fly away for good with your coursework in his beak. There are three different difficulty settings, with increasing obscurity of images (for example, easy mode has a wide view of Babbage and Brunel, while hard mode has a picture of a grit container against a wall), and I've generally gone for a slightly cheesy, but comedic feel to the aesthetics of the game. Still seagull photos superimposed onto the location pop up from the bottom or sides and go back down again, and of course accompanying seagull sound effects nicked off the web occur on button presses and scene changes, etc. I've had great fun putting all that stuff together, and the fact that I've been working on this project consistently over the weeks has allowed me to add many additional touches, from a restart button that asks for confirmation, to little animated feathers falling down when you've managed to beat the game. I think the whole seagull story adds a necessary depth to the idea of it just being a simple photo trail. Not only am I hoping that it doesn't rain too much tomorrow when I present it, but also that it actually works properly. In my tests I've found that the GPS signal is rather unreliable when you go near large buildings, of which there are a fair few around the campus. It tends to place your location too far back a bit, thus making it frustratingly difficult to get on the right spot on the map. I've tried to place the markers as best I can, and widen the area of activation, although wary that that might ruin the accuracy a bit. Another issue is the time limit, which I think may be a bit too generous. The problem is, you don't know how much of a detour you're going to need to take to make your way around buildings, which of course the game can't calculate, so I need to accomodate for this. Still, I think it's a pretty successful game, and I've had loads of fun with it. This, and last years asteroids game have been the most fun projects for me, which kind of suggests that I'd be doing the right thing to go into making games for a living - especially little fun ones like this. I'm planning on uploading it to Mediascapes website, and I hope it'll be of use to future second year students doing this module. A few references to stuff I swiped, just to be on the safe side regarding the 'ol plagiarism.. Photo 1, Photo 2, Photo 3, Photo 4, Photo 5, Photo 6, Sound 1, Sound 2

Scans and ideas

Ollie Holmwood — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:03:36 GMT

Movement Demo Enemy Demo A few scans of the latest ideas for this project, plus flash animations of how the movement and enemy engine will work. Ken and I have decided that I'll be doing the programming, while he slaves away in Photoshop with pixel art, and produces all of the characters and graphics for the game. He's made a mock-up of a typical dungeon room and it's looking good! Ideally, we're going to have the action take place in a series of rooms, each of which take up the whole area of the flash movie, so as to avoid the complex process of scrolling around an area. In addition to dealing with certain groups of enemies by walking shapes around them, the hero will also be equipped with a bow and arrow that is used to deal with one-off enemies, and takes place with a simple button press.

Sea gull Hunt

Ollie Holmwood — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:18:34 GMT

Ok, so my photo trail game is going really well at the moment, and the basic coding is in place really, and save for a few bugs with the radar system, it all works ok. Each difficulty level will have a range of 15 different photos, only ten of which picked out and at random, one point after the other, according to distance. The timer is decided based on this distance. I want to give it some kind of basic narrative however, or a purpose for why you would be wandering around the campus looking at photos, and I've come up with a pretty comical idea (bear with me). You take the role of a student about to hand in some coursework, but a sea gull has nabbed it from you! The photo shows where he's gone, and as you get closer, an image of a sea gull pops up, super imposed over the photo, and he gets bigger the closer you get. Sea gull noises also begin, so the radar system is both visual and audio based. When you catch him, he flies away to the next place. Another idea was some sort of bomb disposal, 24 style thing with relevant sound effects, but I think I prefer the originality of the sea gull idea. One key issue is to make sure my coordinates are correct for each photo, and hopefully if we're allowed to borrow mobile devices over the final weekend before presentation, I'll be able to refine them then. Other than that, it's just a case of polishing it up really.