Midterm Project

Digital art has the benefit of interactivity and commercially they're labeled video games but I have my gripes for how formulaic it is. As it sits video games are more resembling of a sport or a toy, there's few of them that hold a narrative or artistic intent while they remain focused on entertainment value. There was one game director name Yoko Taro who in short is know for making mostly bad games with good stories, one of the talks he did he said that what he found was important about video games was the medium of interactivity as unique to games and the focus for giving the player an experience. I think his idea around game design  and AI is close to paralleling the reading we were given for the project where different artists end up focusing on different parts of computer generated graphics like biology, behavior, mathematics but in the end the emerging technology is always open to new inventive artistic expressions.

For my project I want to focus on building a meaningful action into what the viewer decides to do. I want to act as a short story that responds to the audience. As the viewer gets deeper into the story I want to implement more of the Artificial Life ideas in the reading to shift the tone from a prescripted story to a more organic self active system, one that can agree and disagree based on the information it gets from you.
This type of response came to me when I thought of how the reading described Artificial Life (A-Life) characters in novels are nothing more than words on paper and at most internalized personalities but in code characters function inside a the computer through the transfer of information, it made me think about what the difference is between a Roomba vacuum using walls to navigate a carpet and a bacteria chasing a tasty chemical scent. To be more specific if I built boolean that was called pleasure and one called pain is turning them on and off different than the pain and pleasure an insect feels? Sure there is evolution and life but the what we describe as self has more to do with information and navigating the best from the worst. I think even in a barebones form I would like to attempt to include this idea into my story.
What I want to do through dialogue is closer to a novel where the character is more the words I've printed being imagined as a person but I think that along with some surreal graphics I can invest the viewer into making meaningful choices even if it's just an illusion.

For this project Im very confident in utilizing classes and for loops which is what the dialogue printing in this earlier test video relies on. I've used the substring function to take slices of the string and print them out in paragraph form, the working version moves to the next line of text on a button as well it waits for me to add more text which is essential to adding events between scenes. For the meantime Im limiting myself to focus on fleshing out the story in text form before adding visuals and then more interactivity like after declaring your character has done an action it cuts to the viewer acting out that action with interactions. I've set up my workflow as such because I know the workload can become very bloated when it comes to manually writing events instead of relying solely on looping code so I want to build it in stages that prioritize the writing and then adds in additional elements with remaining time.

I havent decided entirely on the assets yet however Im currently relying on processing to produce graphics since that allows me to control more organic effects I think once I get further in I can be confident in applying them without worrying about aesthetic consistency.