For this workshop we had two days where we had to prototype a way to play games game through utilizing the Arduino as a means to make the different controls.
For the first day we were 6 people in the group so we decided to break up to 3 groups with having the same idea of controls which are the basic, up, down, left, and right movements. We thought of having Pac-Man as the main game we had in mind. We decided on having different sizes where we had different things we could explore. Emil and I had the small prototype where we had a ball kind of thing wrapped with aluminum and had copper tape on the different directions. We found out that Johannes enjoyed that the ball can represent the Pac-Man as well as him rising the question of what is fun? as in is it fun that it is hard/challenging or should it become more of a joystick kind of thing. These questions helped us in our second iteration the following day.
The next day we started with a smaller model of how another mini group conducted their game controller. We had 3 different sizes and ways to play, one was with a helmet kind of thing, the other is a two handed controller and thirdly the one handed controller.
So we decided to work with the box idea where we do not use wires from the bottom of the box but rather have a ball covered with aluminum and have a ground copper tape and copper tape on the wall as well, this meant that we would offer a better user experience since it is more realistic. You can see the hand held controller, Head controller, and both hand controllers respectively below.
The idea of fun is different for different people. Could it be more fun to be always few seconds ahead to make the decision since it takes more responsive time than the hand held prototype. I believe it is fun when something is hard and functional since you know it is possible to do what you need to do. The most responsive would be the smallest one which is the one hand held controller. The responsiveness is of very high importance since it can work for all games that need responsiveness which is a big part of games since a lot of the games even the ones we used as examples need the user to not just have high reflex but also be able to a few seconds ahead of the movement needed.
I can relate this process of iterating on a product and making a some what more polished version of a prototype to music production since you can test out different sounds so what you begin with as a full song is not the final one. It is also found when writing lyrics, the more you use the lyrics and read them the more you will switch things or change things around. When making songs I usually make a couple of different versions of the same song with differences in mixing, lyrics, delivery and having different ad libs or background sounds.
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