CPS - Week 8 - Time - Mood Curator Transition Timing

Context

I have been working on a method of quantifying and adjusting the mood of a game scene - a digital mood curator. During this week’s task on time, I took the opportunity to begin implementing the timing feature of this experiment. I had already created a way for the user to save “mood states” and transition between them but that transition was linear and of a constant duration. I wanted a bit more control over the timing.

Method

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6-2KNwk4BU

I implemented two timing parameters into each mood state, which previously included values for each of the four mood parameters - ominous, energetic, busy, random. These two new timing values are “mood duration” and “transition time”, both measured in seconds. Duration determines how long a mood will remain unchanged in the scene before beginning a transition to another mood and transition time determines how long a mood will take to transition to the next. Eventually I would like to implement customisable timing curves into this process but for now this is a good step.

The ability to control timing of moods and transitions is crucial for this experiment. In the video you can see a series of transitions between 7 mood states. Next step is to set up a testing environment without the UI mood indicators so I can determine weather a sense of narrative is communicated by this experiment.