From this course, I have learned how to explore creativity in my passions as well as collaborate and better understand what limitations I will experience in future creative projects. Even though there weren’t many concepts we were taught outside our own experiments with our projects, I think the concepts in which we were taught were useful. Ambiguity, constraints, and liveness are things I will definitely take into consideration when I intend on being creative. I think this applies to making music for me because I try to constrain myself to which plugins I become familiar with and the genre of music I plan on creating but the final product I create can be extremely ambiguous. DJing for me plays a huge roll on liveness because the transitions I do between songs and the effects, loops, and EQing I do is all on the spot. Liveness also applies to me producing music because I try to make sounds very automated so that they seem to have life given to them.
Ambiguity, constraints, and liveness also apply to my project. The overall objective of the project is very ambiguous outside the scope of its purpose. By this, I mean that the purpose of the project is for users to empathize people with mental disorders but the objectives that users have in the game are pretty ambiguous. The user will be given a fair amount of tasks but there’s no specific objective that the user has to accomplish within the simulation. The user also is constrained to only a certain amount of tasks though so that the user can focus on the purpose of the simulation and putting the user in an interactive environment makes the project have a lot of liveness.
I have faced a few limitations with respect to my intended goals for the project. For example, props within the Unity environment for the user are hard to animate making objectives like feeding a dog that is interactive very hard to do. I also wanted to make the user do tasks like starting a car to go to work but that would require creating an entirely new environment for the car to be in.
Overall, my group members have been very productive and easy to communicate with. We can always find some time we can all meet and we all are able to do our own parts. If I were to start this project again, I think I would put more effort into learning Unity instead of doing things only with Max because most of the implementation in Max has to be done after the environment and a plot are already created and these next 2 weeks will be pretty dense with work.