Narrative - what's the point?

As far as advancing the narrative we thought it would be good to involve another "player", and that is when Jeff struck upon the idea of using Wii Remotes. It was now a question of developing the story to give the players some kind of purpose or reason to be engaging with the bird cage.

First, we separated the two images – one was of the bird, the other was of the cage – and gave control of each of the images via the Wii Remotes. Then Jeff struck upon the genius idea of introducing the villain of the piece – the Killer Kitten! We were to try and get the bird on the cage while avoiding being caught by the kitten, thus introducing an element of gameship and requiring some skill. The instructions will be published on card next to the finished piece, as below:

If you managed to get the bird into the cage before the kitten "pounced" on it, then the bird would be safe inside the cage, out of harm's way. (If not the screen turns red!)

We would then move the scene on to a room where you, as the remote controller, could release the bird. This came about with the use of an open window chosen in our scene.

The player(s) are then rewarded by seeing the bird fly off into the sunset!

So we have set up a potential conflict, heightened the risk, then built in a resolution.

A problem that led to a solution ...

Well, let's just say the test shoot didn't go as well as planned!

I booked time in the green screen studio in order to film the moving image of the bird in the cage, and saved that as a movie file. We were going to isolate the moving image by screening out the green background, and import our scene as a continuous movie into Processing. The idea was that you could speed up or slow down the spinning motion in accordance with how fast you flicked your mouse.

Then we made several realisations, which all seemed to stem from one another, and the whole concept changed and found more solid ground. The original concept was to create a little "game" that required very little skill, no brain power and would last "just a minute", hence the blog's title. The idea was that you would be able to suspend whichever screen-based task you were engaged in – e-mails, spreadsheets, cost revisions, etc – and just allow your brain to do nothing but stare at a nice image on the screen that you were able to control.

But we soon realised that we could do more with the idea. Here the development process splits in two: the narrative and the technical specification

And we also discovered that we could not get movies (least not the way we made them) to function in Processing (plus they weren't running at the right frame rate, and the action of the twisting bird/cage was too quick). So we chucked out the green screen movie and re-shot the whole scene as much sharper stills, and cut out the background to isolate the bird/cage images. This gave us greater flexibility and control when importing the images into Processing.