In response to the theme of Play and Force, I created a simple game in which the player controls a dispirited capsule, gets over obstacles and arrives at the checkpoint. Players can control the capsule to go left, right and down but it is not allowed to go up. The capsule is difficult to control because its axis allows rotation. Players’ input on the capsule’s movements, floatage and gravity are considered forces in this play.
Era (2015) says force play is one of the most essential concepts in sports games. For example, in ball sports, the input of force amounts will decide how far the ball will go. While in my game, a continuous force on the capsule controls not only its direction but also the distance of movements. The capsule can also draw supports from gravity, floatage and corners between bricks to change the direction.
Human: Fall Flat designs its character’s movement to be pudgy, and toddler-like, this deliberately makes players’ control tricky to create a sense of humour (Dan, 2016). Characters in that game will fall down on the ground because of gravity if the player does not push forces on it. This gave me the inspiration of giving a special moving rule for the capsule and making use of its gravity and floatage.
The process of generating ideas for this week’s theme was hard, but once I decided to make a game about applying forces to get over obstacles, images turned up in my mind. I consider the game concept is promising to extend. To improve it, maybe eliminate the rule of going down because gravity already provides the ability to go down. Make more use of angles and corners of bricks to go forward, use floatage to help skip some obstacles and use gravity to get down.
p.s. My pr has some issues while exporting, so I have to record it using other software.
In response to the theme of Play and Object, I created a challenge for myself: play chopsticks as my hands. The challenge is to replace my hands with chopsticks, which means I must use chopsticks to touch those items instead of my hands when I do things. This provides a new way of controllers for play.
I come up with some tasks that can be easily completed by hand, but they may have different effects while using chopsticks. Then I started to take the challenges from easy to difficult. Chopsticks are tools used to make it convenient for people to grab food. However, will they still be convenient tools for other tasks? The answer to it is absolutely no. Using chopsticks makes it more difficult while doing the tasks that I tried in my response.
Children’s Museum of Atlanta(2019) believes that object play is very important to children's growth, it is any play that involves objects ranging from young infants grasping and mouthing anything, to stacking blocks or kitchen toys, etc. Followed by this theory, I tried my best to come up with an object that is very common in life and that children can also use it. Then I realized chopsticks may be a good choice.
I was inspired by one of the examples shared by Duncan during his presentation. Duncan picks up ping-pong balls from a pool using d in each hand. （https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwmO4qlsFrI）This practice reminds me of changing human’s common methods of grabbing things by using unsuitable tools.
When I took this challenge, I found it was much more difficult than my expectations. For example, we use ten fingers to type words on the keyboard. But there are only two small surfaces that contact the keyboard, and the surface is very smooth, which makes typing much more slowly. However, the feeling to use different media to complete tasks gives a novelty. I like trying new things that I have never experienced.
My response is quite related to normal life, which I think may lack creativity in its form. But it is a basic play with objects showing that using unsuitable objects to play is challenging, this is a topic that can be expanded. For instance, unsuitable tools can be a metaphor in life. This can be applied in films and animations to introduce the concept in an indirect way.