A friend just sent me a link to an article chronicling the game design of Super Metroid called The Invisible Hand of Super Metroid (or the Readability Formated Version). I read all 8,888 words and loved every last syllable. I’m going to put this down as a must read article for anyone interested in Game Design, User Interfaces, Video Games, or Super Metroid.
I went to an art museum the other day and came home with the ultimate idea for a “haunted house” attraction.
First off I wouldn’t call it a haunted house. Only a certain crowd of people go to haunted houses. If you really want to scare people, you need people who are not expecting to be horrified. For this reason I would call it something along the lines of “Museum of Horror” or perhaps “Museum of Haunted Houses.”
Next, I would model the attraction after a museum. It would be completely white inside, have marble floors and high ceilings. The first few rooms would have bizarre art pieces, artifacts and a few models of famous haunted houses with information about them.
The first floor would offer a maze of directions and exhibitions. This would make it seem like there was a lot to see and also encourage people to wanter about, potentially separating themselves from their group.
No music would be playing in the museum. It would be silent except for the whispers of those visiting. (Some rooms might have music or sounds, but I’ll touch on that later.)
Around the middle of the first floor there would be a few secret rooms which would entice a visitor in. (Some might be labeled with a “one person at a time” sign.) The inside of these rooms would be dark with only a few lights shining on display cases. A sophisticated camera, thermal and motion tracking system would watch a visitor enter a room, make sure no one was in the vicinity or watching the door and quickly perform a few tasks. The first would be to drop the lights for a second. In the pitch darkness, covered by any potential screams, the entrance to the room would vanish and be replaced by a different exit. The lights would snap back on and the visitor would go on their way, only to discover they came out in a different part of the museum.
The bizarre artwork would continue throughout the museum. Many pieces could be sculptures and paintings of demons and malformed beings/creatures. Other pieces would be of things like clowns or grotesque monkeys. It might also be creepy to have some sort of mangled doll that keeps appearing in or on the artwork of different rooms.
One of the art pieces would be a realistic sculpture of a girl who drown herself. She would be pale and have wet hair with a muddy face and hands. Her dress would be wet, warn, frayed and perhaps ripped a bit. a few rooms later, I would have wet footprints on the floor and a pool of water in front of a painting. This might happen in other places as well.
The stairway going up would discretely skip at least one floor on the way up. (Perhaps having the levels offset one step for every floor, perhaps all in one go. The tall ceiling can help to fake this. Also many museums have half levels or partial levels that go up a few steps at a time.) This way they visitor will encounter new and strange floors on their way back down. It will also mess with their perception as they go down more floors than they went up.
There would be a number of rooms on different floors and in different areas that would be identical, except that they would all be facing different directions. This would help to disorient the visitor to thinking they know where they are going when they really don’t have a clue.
Sound and sound effects will come into play in later floors and rooms. In the museum I visited there was a panel of speakers in the wall where a voice kept saying things like “na na na na” when heard from adjacent rooms it actually sounded creepy. If odd noises like that continued to occur from time to time it would be very scary. Especially if you didn’t know where it was coming from. Again using cameras, motion and thermal sensors, it would be easy to trigger sound events in rooms that are either adjacent or near someone walking through. A simple AI program could ensure that it doesn’t happen rhythmically or systematically but rather have a randomness so the visitor does not realize it is automated. Another sound effect to use would be footsteps to make it sound like other people are walking around.
The other sound I would use is the sound of little children laughing or playing. For those that played Zelda: Twilight Princess, the Celestia temple in the sky had creepy background music. It really made me uneasy when I played it. I would do something similar for some of the rooms, although I wouldn’t have as much or any background music, just the young-children-esque sounds.
Using projectors, (with the sensory equipment) I would make people appear in the room ahead of the visitor and walk out of sight (around a corner), then disappear. Neat shadow effects could be done as well. The projectors would have to be hidden in such a way that no visitor would ever see them. This could be done in a number of ways, but it is vital to the efforts of terror.
There are artists that create 3D murals on the side of buildings. I would have a room that featured a giant 3D painting on two of the walls. I would have several doorways in the painting, most of which would just be painted doorways. One of them would be real, though. It wouldn’t be *hard* to find your way out of the room, it would just cause some confusion at first.
At one of the half stairways I would place a pool of fake blood, with a trail to make it look like a body was dragged away.
Most of the museum would be well lit, minus a few strategic locations where some trickery must be done. One room, or perhaps a small cluster of rooms would have lights that flicker on and off, like there was a broken or faulty power cable. I would take advantage of this lighting to maybe have a picture or two switch positions from time to time.
Something potentially harder to pull off, but even cooler to do, would be to have a couch that was indented like an invisible person was sitting on it. When a visitor entered the room, it would expand out, as if someone stood up and left. A similar feat could include a table chair that gets pushed back from the table accompanied by footsteps of someone walking away. (Motors and/or magnets would have to be used here, but it would be vitally important that the visitor could not see any mechanics behind it.)
The main concept of my haunted house would be that of emptiness and loneliness. Many haunted houses try to do scare visitors by surprises and darkness. I think open empty whiteness is more likely to freak people out and create a memory that will last longer in-your-face jack-in-the-box style events.
What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? Where can I improve things? Does anyone want to fund this project?
Today I needed to make an MP3 CD to backup some music. So I fired up iTunes and opened up the preferences to change my burn settings to MP3 CD. Much to my surprise, I couldn’t find that setting anywhere. I looked around for a few minutes and finally decided it must be gone.
I knew that all the MP3s would not fit on an audio CD, so I figured I would just tell it to burn and it would give me an option then. Much to my astonishment, and with a great swell in UI happiness, I discovered this dialog:
This really makes me happy. This is right where these preferences should be. The user can now just click burn a disk and then choose, rather than making the choice ahead of time in an obscure preference tab. I don’t know when this got changed, I don’t burn many disks so I am probably late in noticing. This is a great example of making software user friendly.
If there is one thing I hate when traveling it is trying to find access to the Internet. It seems that no one offers free Internet for customers or visiters, but will gladly charge you hansomely for a few hours of access.
Recently, on a family vacation to the North Shore of Lake Superior, my domain name expired. I knew it was going to expire soon, but I thought I still had a few weeks because I had been ignoring the spam like emails that MyDomain was sending out every few days for the last two months. (Side note, I don’t see the point of renewing a domain name 60 days ahead of schedule, so stop bloody bugging me about it!)
Anyway, two days after my domain name expired I was in the town of Grand Marais, MN. Most of the town us covered by a BorealWireless service. (Which supplies wireless to most of the city, several busineses, and even their library.) Fortunately for me I found an open network called “NETGEAR” and was able to check my email on my iPod Touch. Even more fortunately, I actually read my email from MyDomains which told me I had an expired Domain. (Side note: I don’t trust them to hold onto my credit card info so the auto renew failed.) I was unable to renew my domain via my iPod, but I was able to call and renew my domain for another year.
Okay, so where am I going with this? This incident got me thinking. I don’t want to pay for an hours worth of time so I can spend 30 seconds checking my email to see if there is an emergency. What I would like to see happen can be described in two senarios:
(Mediocre solution) WiFi providers offer a 5 or 10 minute wireless plan for a small fee. Just enough time so you can check in on things. Then, if the need were to arise, the user could buy a longer block of time.
(Better solution) WiFi providers offer a limited 2 or 5 minute free period wherein the user may check in on things and decide if the need to purchase more online time.
Here is a novel idea, rather than charging people an exorbitant fee for a pathetic service, give customers something they are willing to pay for.
Several weeks back I decided to build a computer desk. I began by modeling out my idea both on paper and also in Google Sketchup. (Links to the video are in the post New Computer Desk.)
Today I took the plunge and bought the wood I would need. Total price was $320. I had hoped to spend less than $200 on wood, but the boards only came in 6 foot lengths, rather than 8 foot lengths. Had I taken more notice of this in earlier shopping, I might have been better prepared, but I was able to grab what I needed without too much rethinking of plans.
My wood options were rather limited, the only two options I was given were Pine or Aspen. (I could have gotten oak, but it was far too expensive and would have required much more work.) I had already decided to go to with Aspen.
I bought 10 boards, 3 – 1″x24″x6′ boards, 6 – 1″x12″x8′, and 1 – 1″x6″x8′. (My original plans were more along the lines of 3 – 1″x24″x8′ boards, 3 – 1″x12″x8′, and 1 – 1″x6″x8′. This means that I will be needing to glue some of the 12″ boards together to obtain more 24″ boards.)
I brought the boards home and began to stain them. My original vision was to have a lighter colored desk, more golden in color. We didn’t have this type of stain, though, and rather then buying something new, I decided to use what we had at home and went with a walnut stain.
It’s darker than imagined, but the grain on the wood is amazing. It looks wonderful, and I am very happy with it thus far.
I stained all of the boards on one side and a stained the most boards on the second side as well. Tomorrow I will finish my staining and should be able to start cutting out the pieces.
I will be posting the updates on my progress as I have time, and new photos will be posted to my flickr account. Hopefully will be able to post up my blueprints when I am able to scan them in as well.
This next semester I will not be living in the dorms on campus and as a result I will be needing to furnish the rooms where-in I will be living. I have decided that I need a nice computer desk to work with and I have decided that I want to build it myself.
I have done my research and over the next week or two I’ll be finalizing the blueprints so that I can start the building process sometime mid July. I’ll be posting updates as the project moves along.
If you want to see a 3D fly through of the desk, I have both a Quicktime Movie and a Youtube Version. (Quicktime has better frame rate.)
Technology has reached a point where consumers are literally afraid of their electronics. They are not afraid that the electronics will attack or hurt them, but rather afraid that if they touch something, they will break it. This has several implications, which are rather discouraging for the more tech minded individuals.
To begin, allow me to illustrate the problem.
Let’s say that you develop the concept of a car. You design a car, you engineer a car and you are finally able to build a car. After finishing this tremendous project, you take it out and show it to people. You say, “Look at this! It’s a car! Isn’t it neat? You can have it! Go ahead and use it!”
After leaving the car in their hands, you leave, only to return several hours later to find twenty or thirty people pushing the car to the top of a hill, climbing onto the roof, and riding the car down the hill. You look on in horror as the car smashes into a tree, at which point everyone picks themselves up off the ground, brushes themselves off, and begins to push the car up the hill again.
This is not at all what you expected, so you try to explain: “Wait! Look, see? You can open the door and go inside! There’s a steering wheel! You can make it turn! There is a radio, you can listen to music! There are breaks, so you don’t hit trees! Why are you pushing it up the hill?! You could drive it up the hill, in fact, you could drive it down the hill, or anywhere you want! You can use it for so much more? Don’t you see!?!?”
The problem that we face is the result of many issues. The first being:
Features are not immediately obvious.
The people building the technology take their work for granted. They added or designed features that made sense and they understand it perfectly. It’s completely obvious to the builder that a car should have a steering wheel. Isn’t that common sense? You should be able to set the home page on your web browser, right? Doesn’t everyone know that? In short, no. It’s an additional feature, not a requirement, and as such many people will not even think about it.
Users don’t always understand the language used.
???????? ????? ????????Why do you go to “Preferences” to change the settings? How is someone suppose to know that? Take a look at the screenshot to the right. Check out the keyboard shortcut for “Paste and Match Style.” What on earth is that symbol? I don’t know about you, but I don’t have any keys on my keyboard which even remotely match that first symbol. What’s with the up arrow? Is that the up arrow key? (No, it’s the shift key.) How do we expect people to know this? Now take a look at “Complete.” First off, even I don’t even know what “Complete” does and secondly, what on earth is that circle with that arrow? How is this not confusing?
If users don’t understand what a feature does, it doesn’t matter if they can find it or not. Granted, helping them to find the feature is the first step, but they are not going to go out looking for the feature unless they either know that it should be somewhere or they just want to dabble around. The users are more than happy to ride the car down the hill. It’s fun and exciting, it does what they want. Why do they need more?
Users are afraid of breaking things.
If a user has something that works for their needs, they have no reason to go and change anything. It might break something, and if it does break something, they may not be able to put it back to how it is now.
This ties in greatly with the last issue. If users don’t understand what is being said, they won’t use the feature because they don’t know what it does. But they are afraid to try new things because they fear that doing something they don’t understand will completely break what they have.
In some respects, this is a good fear to have. Users shouldn’t go around deleting random files from their system folder. (Or for that matter, any files from their system folder.) When it comes to learning more about their computer and features that they have, it is counter productive.
I don’t really know why I should put this smelly liquid in my car. What if that means I can’t ride it down the hill? What if that breaks it? What if that’s not suppose to go in there? I’m fine how I am, I won’t touch anything.
What can we do about it?
The solution is not a simple project. The good news is that the younger children today are becoming much more adept at working with the newer technology. The learn quickly and are more willing to try new things. It’s the older generation of users that will need more help in learning their way around things.
For the consumers we need to find a way of explaining the features, the language and how to explore the program. Once the users begin to understand, they will be much more capable of handling issues on their own.
While educating people about technology, though, it is important to also educate the technology creators and designers so that they understand how to view their design as if they are a first time user.
Before I end, let me give one example of a cool new feature which I think is really a great step in the right direction.
Apple has done a really neat thing with the Help menu in Leopard. The Help menu contains a search box which not only searches thee help documents, but also searches the menus for options. This is a great feature to help explore the program and to find features. We need more things like this.
On my Mac I have a set of tools I use in conjunction for all my website design. For most of my graphic design I use Photoshop, I’m very fortunate to have such a powerful tool at my disposal. For coding and file transfer, I have a small little set of tools which has become indispensable.
Transmit: Transmit is my favorite FTP client. I have used it for a few years now. It’s reliable and robust. One of my favorite features is that it allows me to edit files on the server using the program of my choice. Which are usually:
TextMate: I got TextMate from the original MacHeist bundle. If it wouldn’t have been included, I probably wouldn’t have ever justified TextMate’s steep price tag. After using it for a year and a half, I don’t think I could live without it. It’s definitely worth every penny.
CSSEdit: I love CSSEdit. It’s an amazingly powerful tool for working with CSS. It allows me to type in my CSS when I know what I want, but also choose options from menus if I don’t remember the syntax. I can’t imaging designing without it.
All of these tools work wonderfully, but also they are very pretty applications. They are designed well. I don’t think I would call them perfect, but are usually very intuitive.
What’s in your toolkit?
LandofChaos.net, has been in much need of a complete overhaul and today I just sat down and did it.
I went out looking for inspiration at a number of different CSS gallery sites. As I looked I noticed a common theme throughout about 75% of them. They all had a logo in the top left corner and the main links were in the top right. This was what I was originally thinking for a design, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be so cliche.
I decided to be cliche, but give it my own “chaotic” twist. I thought it would be neat if the drop down logo sat at a slight angle, just enough so that it looked like it was on accident. I think I ended up with too much of an angle, but I decided to leave it. The other thing I thought would be neat to not have the main navigation menu line up. As I started playing around with it though, it looked to planned, like I had an artistic theme and not like it was annoyingly off kilter. So rather than try to set something up so it would be pixel perfect, I decided to go with a completely random method by setting up each menu item to be spaced a random distance from the top of the page. I toyed with some side-to-side randomness, but nothing worked quite how I wanted it.
Beyond that I moved a few links around and added a complete RSS feed of latest posts from the Land of Chaos Store, Apathetic Thursday, Blogging While Paused, Flickr and YouTube.
Let me know what you think of the new look.
Just finished some coding work, which at long last has brought some wonderful functionality to my pride and joy, DeChaos.
DeChaos 4.0 has improved functionality, allowing for 1 level of subfolders and also moving forward and backward freely, skipping some photos and going back to rename others. I have also added support for other file types. At first I limited the program to jpegs, but now it accepts jpegs, pngs, gifs and tiffs.
I had a great problem solving experience last night which not only solved the problem I was facing but also did a great job of helping me to realize a real world example of some of the things I am learning in my “Theatrical Design” class.
I was working on my photo sorting program, known as DeChaos, and I was struggling with the issue of allowing users to move forward and backward along the list of sorted photos. I wanted it to work so that if someone knew they had multiple shots of the same photo they could jump ahead or skip over a photo if they wanted to see what was next. The issue that faced me was that if the user decided to sort that photo the program would then move onto the next photo and, should they attempt to go back to the last photo, the program would try to load the photo that had already been sorted (meaning it moved location) and would error out because the photo file wouldn’t exist.
I had in my head, multiple elaborate schemes of how to keep track of the photos that the user skipped and how to jump back to them, keeping them from going back too far, and the whole thing was a complete mess.
I was thinking this over while sitting on the steps outside the SuperBowl party that was going on in the other room when Anna came over to talk to me. I started to explain the problem to her so she had an idea of what I was working on, when mid-sentence the answer struck me like a lightning bolt of energy.
The problem I was working on in my mind was “How do I keep track of the pictures that a user skips,the pictures that the user sorts, without slowing up my program, making a lot of unnecessary lists and variables and keep it simple and reliable.”
But as I explained my problem I realized that the issue was really “How do I keep the user from sorting photos after they have skipped over the photos.” The answer was immediately obvious to me: Don’t give them the option.
If I don’t allow users to sort photos after they have skipped some, they are forced then to go back to the photo they were at when they first skipped ahead and resume sorting from there. It was an amazing solution, easy to implement, and it makes perfect sense.
What this really did for me though, was open my eyes and look at the big picture, which was really “what do I need to prevent?” rather than “how can I make this work?”
This is something that people often overlook, sometimes we are just so focused on the gears that we don’t see that they aren’t doing anything. Thats when we need to take a step back and look at the whole clock.
I just saw a post on Modern Life is Rubbish talking about how he changes his color scheme on the first of every month. I thought this sounded like a sweet idea. The best part is that my color scheme for this site is so minimal, I basically have to change the link colors once a month. I took the liberty of changing all the link colors to more spring colors for the month of April. I think they look nice and pastel. Hopefully later today I will have some time to choose the rest of the months colors, and I hope to set up a script that will change the colors for me, so I don’t have to think about it. Maybe I could even get a WordPress plugin made out of it. We’ll see.
