A CMU Student's Day

Intention:
My intention was to create an artwork with images and sounds that didn't belong to me. I am not good with paintings so I didn't want to do an image. I absolutely love musical instruments, I have tried playing the piano, violin and the flute; however, since I am less than 5 feet tall, proportionally my hands are too small. On the other hand, I am a Computer Science major with intended minor in Game Design and I have done many games before. So I decided making a video game would be the best.

Context:

Are video games art? It is a very debated topic to discuss. Normally, I would not be able to prove one way or another since it depends on point of view, and therefore, is not provable.  However, this time, I was the artist, and I believe that video games are art, so I defined it as art for myself and did it. It is difficult to say how a video game could be compared to the classical artists pieces since it is a completely different piece. So my outcome will not relate to any artist except that it will be using the photographs that other people took and music that other people have used. Since this may be presented to the class, I wanted my project to make the students feel as much as possible. This class has mostly the Science (Science, Engineering...) people, so I thought I could put my schedule and have them go through one day. 

Process:

I first tried to make a painting or audio sound but no ideas would come to me. Then I realized that I consider video games art and I enjoy making them and I'm good at making them. I have thought about what the story should be a lot. I have written two games, but decided on the game that had the most connection to people's lives. (It is also the game that my friend preferred, when I showed him both games.) I researched images and songs that would fit the mood in the game and make the setting clear to the players. I've had problems with both coding and creating the story in such a short amount of time since I made two games to start with, but it was alright. I got my images and my soundtrack from outside sources that don’t belong to me, and not doing everything myself made it easier.

Product:

I created my game. I had to run it many many times to make sure that it doesn't crash since it had bugs. I used a game engine, images from the internet, music from Youtube and my imagination. I used an online trimming program to get the music I wanted. I used two different musics for the two different paths to take: One of them leading to being a good student and one of them leading to being a not so hardworking student. I used images to show the player where he/she is. I didn't include any conversations since I wanted many people to be able to connect to it. The classes may be different than other peoples but I wanted to use real examples.

Updated link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_JpH6zyAIePdHJlcHdiTDFKY1U/view?usp=sharing

To play:

1. Download the file

2. Extract all files

3. Run "A Carnegie Mellon Student" application

For people who don't want to play:

It's a game where you wake up and go to classes or sleep in. At the end, you either get "You are a good student!" or "You are not a very hardworking student" depending on how much you slept in and if you went to office hours. It has 62-150, 15-150, 15-213 and 21-241. 

Critique:

I’m half happy and half unhappy with this project. On one hand, I really wanted to create a game, and I did create a game. On the other hand, I don’t like any of my games starting from 5 minutes after I finish coding, so as I’m writing these sentences right now, I don’t like it that much anymore. However, I am proud of myself that I was able to piece together this game with the story, code, images and music. If I imagine my inner critic, I can hear him saying “I guess you didn’t do too bad” This is a response I’m happy with since normally it’s more like “I can’t believe a person could write something this bad.” Usually the main thing I would be upset with any game is the story, but I wanted the story of this game to be extremely general and usual. I wanted to show that this usual day is a day that (I am guessing) will correspond to many students’ days in this class.

Reflection:

I have only shown this to one friend and he has nearly the exact same schedule as me, so I don’t know if my plan of being able to capture people’s days have worked or not. I will probably know after I finish this post and I will add after I get comments if I get any. Right now, I feel like I would not change much even if I did. I may add a couple of sentences, more bad jokes but that would be it.

Maybe it didn't work very well. Apparently 15-150 was a good choice though.

I tried to put screenshots but it doesn't work. If I had more time, I would also find a way to fix that.