Well, with the help of the internet, I now have a star wars force trainer hooked up to an arduino. Reading minds has never been so simple and narrated by Yoda.
This is very exciting as now I can control things with my mind. I now have to work on making something to control with thought to further prove how cool this thing is.
Once again. Coolest. Toy. Ever.
Lookie what I got delivered this morning
It’s a Star Wars force trainer! Now I can control a ball with my mind.
See look it floats and everything! The best part is, I can now hack this and control things other than a ping pong ball with my mind.
Mind control is the future!
Recently, i’ve been getting bored and wanting to make things. I also stumbled upon a nice article on instructables where it detailed how to make a secret knock detector for your door. It uses an arduino and various parts and it detects the pattern of your knocks on a door. If you get it right, the door unlocks and you can walk in, if you get it wrong, nothing happens.
It intrigued me as I have some interesting ideas for my final major project next year, and this could be part of one. So I decided to see how easy it was to build.
Turns out very. After following the guide, everything worked just fine. It picked up knocking on a table and some L.E.D’s flashed to let me know I got it right or wrong and it’s pretty reliable to boot.
When you get the knock right
When you get the knock wrong.
I haven’t got the motor working yet as I don’t have the right parts to hook up a motor yet. I think. I have to look into that. His way seems very complicated as I thought you could control a motor a little bit more simply than that.
But that’s for future Jon to deal with.
Okay, so triff of the David’s finally manged to traverse apples guidelines and review system. It has made it to the app store, you should go grab yourself a copy of it too. I can tell you now that it’s great fun to play.
So Adam, you no longer need to build my code in an awkward way, you can just head on over to the apple store and give us fungineers 59p.
On the DVD I have given you, there is the xcode project for our game. You can build this to your iDevice and play through the updated version of our game.
This is if the game hasn’t been released onto the iTunes store of course. It’s quite possible that it will, and possible that we need to make a few changes so i’m covering some options here.
You need to make a few changes, like the bundle identifier and the provisioning profile under the build area of info.
Oddly enough, you still may get an odd error. A popup window may come up saying something about linking or something similar. if you just go into the build menu and choose clear all targets, you’ll be fine and ready to go.
Thats a very odd error that xocde likes to throw out when you open up and try to build someone elses project.
Anyway, enjoy our game.
The most important tools while creating Triff, hasn’t just been our minds and imaginations, but also cloud computing.
To get over the need to send lots of files to each other all the time and share diagrams with each other, we decided to set up accounts with sites that let us collaboratively share and view files and mind maps.
Box.net is the site we used for file sharing. It let us collaborate on Triff anywhere where we decided to work. By the end of the journey, we had over 100 files uploaded and shared with each other.
This service worked wonderfully, and was completely free. We only wanted to share small files as is the nature of our project and so the size limitations on how much we could upload wernt an issue.
The other site that played a huge role in making triff work is Mind42.com. This is a mind mapping site that let us collbarotively work on the plot and narrative of the game. More importantly, it gave us a visual basis for how the game is laid out and let me be able to link everything together and find the correct slide we needed to change with minimal fuss.
Apart from the zoo stage where that had been started on another mind map and my numbering labels were never transfered over due to Gary not liking me naming the slides and my laziness.
When working in a group like we did, being able to share files and thoughts is the most important thing. We needed a better way to discuss things, preferably through skype or some other system, but that never got put into place.
But working in the same room or in different houses, these sites let us work effortlessly together. Fantastic.
Well, we have had a few hiccups with submitting the app, various things that apple didnt like, small things like it not working blah blah David Hasselhoff being stabbed blaah.
Anyway, there are a few screenshots of the game as it is. It all works now and so its just a case of tinkering with it so that apple approve us.
These are the screenshots that accompany the app in the app store.
BE AMAZED!
All looks pretty slick eh? Works and reacts well too, especially the iPhone features like accelerometer and mic.
Dont you just want to hire us to make you pretty apps ay?
For our trade stand, we wanted an authentic looking bus stop in lui of not having a bus shelter as our stand. So, I took inspiration from the bus stop signs that we see in our area. These are usually made by travel line.
First off, Gary went and took some photos.
Bus stops in our general area all look the same. They have that kind of green and that layout. Oddly enough, I started creating the sign before I had seen this photo and was basing my creating off of a google image search for Bus stop. The sign was from cambridge and had a yellow stripe on it. This looked odd when I presented it to the others.
We discussed over facebook about the general look. They didnt like the yellow.
After this discussion, I went away and made the required changes. We ended up with a sign we were all proud with.
We then ended up with this graphic on our sign post.
Didn’t win us any awards though…
The main artwork for Triff of the Davids is the poster, or what most people will see, the main game screen.
I should point out that even though Luke is the art director of the group, I was tasked with creating some art pieces, mainly when he was too busy doing other work or found it too difficult. In these rare circumstances, I stepped in and took over. All in all, I created three pieces really. This, the bus stop sign and David Bowie in Carbonite.
This is one that I created and I think it needs a run through. It is created as a homage to movie posters. The larger, A0 poster that we printed up for our trade stand, is definitely a movie poster. That was the whole look and feel that we were trying to express when advertising and promoting the game.
Initially, lets look at the movie posters for labyrinth.
This poster focuses hugely on David Bowie. It makes him an icon, and also takes a very light hearted view of him. Just from your first look of this poster, you can tell its an odd film that is in no way serious.
We wanted this kind of imagery for our poster and main screen. We make an icon out of David Bowie and idolise him through out the entire game so we thought that his image should be represented as such in our poster. He should be represented as this grand figure overlooking a city. This lead us to think of Godzilla.
But, our game doesnt focus David Bowie as the bad guy, so destruction should be left out of our imagery. This grand, overpowering view of godzilla trampling through a city scape is iconic of grand characters in movies. So essentially, we wanted a huge image of David Bowie in a very iconic, idolized pose.
Also, there are the standard movie poster attributes that make a movie poster instantly recognisable as a movie poster. The title and the credits. Making those look the part is also an essential part of the whole movie experience. So for this I chose the obvious, movie poster font, trajan pro. For the title, I went with a very b-movie esque font choice and styled the whole poster to make it look very much like a b-movie poster.
As you can see, the poster that I created for us pretty much encapsulates all the classic movie poster elements and also how we wanted to portray David Bowie in grandeur sense.
