DATE OF EVENT: Wednesday, November 13 (Doors open @ 5:30pm.)
LOCATION: Museum of the Moving Image – William Fox Amphitheater (Queens, NY)
“To celebrate the opening of The Situation Room, MoMI and Giphy Arts will present a discussion with artist Carlos Alfonzo Sanchez and curator Lindsay Howard, and moderated by MoMI Director of Curatorial Affairs Barbara Miller. Dani Newman, Director of Artist Partnerships at Giphy, will introduce the discussion. Sanchez’s lookit (2019), the first work in the installation series, will be on view in the visitor elevator. Followed by reception with light refreshments.”
I’ve been researching the Unity manual to figure out how I can get Virtual Reality working for my prototype. It’s mostly trying to figure out how I can get it working with Windows Mixed Reality for my own testing purposes, and with the Oculus Quest, for final use in the showcase. It would, of course, be ideal to have it work with different types of headsets. It seems like getting it to work with Windows Mixed Reality will be more difficult, and it may be hard to switch back and forth between Windows Mixed Reality and Oculus Quest in between testing. The default seems to be Oculus, which is good since I’d want to use that in the end anyway. I don’t know many people with experience in Unity, but I do know a few friends who are good at coding. I’m definitely going to need their help throughout this process. As for working in Maya, I’m still fairly new to that as well, and thankfully I have many friends with a lot of experience in Maya and can help me with nearly anything when I get to that portion of the project.
I’ve researched much more about the exact effects of domestic violence (DV), or also known as intimate partner violence (IPV), based on scientific research. It seems that emotional or psychological abuse can be more damaging to a person’s mental health and cause more emotional distress than other forms of abuse. It’s hard to tell for sure, but it seems to influence long-term depression. They were 2.06 times as likely to experience minor depression, and others were 1.75 times as likely to experience severe depression compared to women who experience no abuse. It seems like over time, after about 5 years, is when there seems to be less severe depression over those who recently left an abusive relationship. So emotional abuse can really have long-term negative effects on someone and their mental health. It affects so much externally as well, such as credit issues (78%), more money problems (74%), and even some struggle with employment. There was a broad range of 25-50% of women experiencing issues with finding housing. Emotional abuse can really turn someone’s life upside down since it can be such a traumatic event for someone.
I haven’t been able to learn much this week, again something that you probably did not want to hear, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything. I pretty much conducted the same research methods did last week because its all the same in terms of consistency. I read more of Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” and he gets more into detail about how comic books as a whole can be interpreted as another language. Pannels don’t necessarily have to be orchestrated in a simple format as being included in a box, but rather they are orchestrated in many different shapes and sizes. This was a revelation form my past experiences making comic books as a kid where I would not just use the simple box form but as I continued to make some more, I decided to reshape the panels in different sizes.
Another thing I discovered was a forum page where users of the unity engine specifically tied to the application I’m planning on using have voiced their concerns and questions. I was able to make an account and soon I will be engaging in the community as a way of acquiring some help with my project. This will be incredibly useful seeing as how most of the people in the forum have used the application before and have had experience with its interface and many features it has.
That has been pretty much the extent of this week’s research. So far what i had gathered will help in the coming weeks
For my prototype plan I can show off a couple of things that is involved with my game. The first could be the character designs or 3d models of the characters that are going to be in the game. The second can be the movement of the characters in unity or a test for the roulette system in the game. The third can be a 3d printed model or some type of physical build of a certain aspect of the game.
I want to show off some of the 3d models i am working on for the game and maybe some movement and animation along with them. There will be 4 playable characters to choose from with different color variations for each so that multiple people can play the same character. I am very far with my first character model right now so he will probably the first model i show to the class. The character models are very important t the game because i want to show how well i can do 3d modeling to companies.
I want to add a physics system to my game to make it fun and funny for people to play such as gang beast. I want it a little more rigid than gang beast though. I love movement options in games so i might focus on that to make it fluid and fun. So the prototype i wanna show is maybe a multiplayer test that people can see if the movement feels good or not. The model i’ll use to show that will be my first character. Also showing off a bunch of minigame ideas and names would be great to because when i think of mario party minigames their focus is not on movement.
Since my game has to do with casinos and gambling there are a lot of different things i can make physically to show off a certain aspect of the game. The easiest may be making a blackjack dealer card shoe to show how fluid cards can be grabbed. A holder for the cards would also be useful.
Design and decide on characters I want to use for my project. Try to find a distinct style or some sort of design choice to unify all of my characters together. Decide on multiple color pallets and other things I can buff out.
Create a motion graphic test animation. I want to make sure I can animate it correctly so I can implement it into my project
Create a test 3D model. I have very little experience with 3D modeling so I need to make sure I can get better for the final iteration of my project.
My second week of research was a little more tightly packed with other class assignments so I wasn’t able to research as much as I would’ve liked to. However, I did do a bit more research into both more mythology and into the more technical aspects of my project.
I decided for this week I would like to focus a lot more on Japanese mythology. There are a lot of different gods and demons in Japanese mythology. However unlike Greek mythology, a lot of the demons are not individual characters, rather they’re more akin to different species or races of monsters. However, through my research I did come across different stories of different heroes fighting villains. What interested me was a lot of these stories came from kabuki theatre plays which has a distinct costume and art style that I might want to incorporate into my redesigns of each character. In particular, there’s the story of Kintaro/Kintoki and his journey to kill the Oni(demon) king Shuten Douji. There was also an interesting story regarding the gods Amaterasu, the sun goddess and her brother Susano-o, the god of storms. After killing one of her attendants, Amaterasu falls into a depression and prevents the sun from shining. Susano-o was exiled from heaven and only allowed back in after slaying the multi-headed serpent Yamata-no-Orochi. He ends up killing him and forging a sword with his spine or back. There is also another story with the toad sage Jiraiya and his rivalry with his former pupil Orochimaru, the snake sage. I thought this dynamic was pretty interesting considering that snakes eat toads, making Jiraiya a sort of underdog hero. In fact, there seems to be a big theme of serpents being villains in these mythologies. I’m guessing it is because snakes are often poisonous and dangerous, leading to a natural aversion to them.
I haven’t done too much research on Norse mythology, I plan on doing more during my free time. However, I do like the rivalry between the well-known gods Thor and Loki. Norse mythology is pretty fascinating in that a lot of these characters, including villains make reoccurring appearances, particularly Loki. While he can be considered evil, especially as he is the main leader in the prophetic war of Ragnarok against the gods, he is a trickster god, who often causes less harmful mischief just to mess with people. I hope to read a bit more on this mythology further in the week.
I also decided to look up a tutorial on motions graphics to try to gain a bit more information on the medium. I haven’t finished it but it has been pretty helpful and has been teaching me the basics. I also plan to watch more of this tutorial during this week.
Research plan update 2 is mostly just the same research as the first update where i am looking up more useful information for making my game. The first thing i researched was other movements and animations in games that i could recreate for my game. I also looked up some 3d models that i could use as reference for making my characters and that helped me to find a shape for all of them.
I thought it was best to make them look for like cartoons so that it is better to model them faster but still give them good looking details to show off all the things that i have learned.
I also picked up another book for game design to help me out and learn some more c# to make the game perform better. Such as character selection and menus and starting and stopping the game. I have also researched how i could use math to figure out some codes to make the game perform how i want it to perform.
I made the decision to use Python this week, due to its similarities to Java and C++ (versus LISP and Nyquist) and a large amount of applicable libraries. In particular, I found a library called Keras that was written to handle code for neural networks, making my job to program one much easier. As a introduction, I watched a two hour video that explained neural networks and showed basic applications of them with Keras. In addition to Keras, I came across a library called Music21 through an article on generating music with Keras. Music21 appears to make inputting MIDI scores into neural networks much easier.
I also thought a bit more on the data I plan to use. At the earlier prototyping stages, I figured it would be a good idea to write a bunch of short, simple songs myself, just to keep things more basic for scratching the surface of Keras. However, once I get past that stage, I will need some MIDI scores of well known songs so that I will have a clearer goal to test the output’s accuracy with. I have been thinking of albums I could use as test sets for this stage; preferably albums that have a consistent sound. Two albums that have come to mind are AC/DC’s Back in Black and Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory. A part of my mind wonders if I will need bigger test sets, since albums tend to have only around 10 to 15 songs, but I don’t think that will be a glaring issue.
One simple idea for testing the accuracy of songs generated by the program involves asking a simple question: “What band does this sound like?” I would have to ask other people this question instead of myself, since their answer would be unbiased. The biggest issue with this method is that it is a lot easier to make a neural network if the accuracy is given in a percentage, rather taking in one of two possible answers. Therefore, I think the best way to going about testing for accuracy is by using this question: “From a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being most accurate, how much does this sound like *band name*?”
Here’s a list of the links I referenced in this post:
This week I focused on researching strategies for running effective ads through the Facebook ads manager. It was hard to find any up to date academic sources on the subject. I watched videos on YouTube, but the most useful sources I found was talking to 2 people I met who run digital ads as a side business.
One person I interviewed has a digital marketing consulting company that he runs while in school. The other freelance manages ads for independent artists. They were both able to give me solid advice for running ad campaigns.
Make many variations of a single ad and test them. This means for each ad I make, I’ll create 5-10 different versions with slightly different messages or creative. then I’ll run them all with low budgets. This will give me data to see what is the most effective variation of the ad, and I can put a bigger budget into that.
Instagram stories are the most effective platform for my target market. Instagram stories engage the user because it fills the screen 100% and the user is guarenteed to view the content.
Targeting. Know your audience. Adjust the targeting if things aren’t working. Am I trying to reach people in a specific part of the world? Or do I want to target the cheapest markets for lower CPM.
Experience is the best way to learn. Doing research will only take you so far. In my last campaign I had CPC of $.40 in the United States. I want to try to lower it to .20 by testing the ads and having better targeting.
I’m running an ad campaign in November to get more experience before next semester. I will report the results of that campaign tip make sure I’m on the right track.