I completely changed around my interactive touch project, but here it is in all it’s glory!
(UPDATES ARE ADDED AT THE END)
My underappreciated truth was the strength and state of friendship, and in this case, especially between my Blep and Ece who I’ve mentioned previously. Below is a demo of the piece
The background was made and rendered in Blender with some light post processing and animation in Krita to help adjust lighting. The pieces over top of the background were also animated in Krita and were drawn in. I tried to make the interaction project feel more like you were seeing the memories of Blep the lizard and his relationship with Ece. I wanted to express this through Blep’s happy memories with Ece, but also one where he’s concerned about Ece.
Whenever a use grounds themselves to Blep by holding his tounge and pressing the buttons, each of the different memories show up and eventually fade away to give the feeling of looking to the past.
I want to add more sounds and ambience to the piece as well as cleaning up the GIFs which didn’t have partial transparency for clean transition into the background. Below is all the scenes that will be visible when the user presses the buttons and a sketch of the new template for Blep.
UPDATES:
Since the project was finished I started to mainly focus on making a cleaner version of the controller. The version I’m working on currently will have lights that are around the collar of Blep and the newer version will be using a capacitive touch sensor instead of a Makey Makey. I wanted to remake the controller first and foremost because the crochet version was never intended to be part of the project, but was good for prototyping. I still need to add ambience, but I will be working over the weekend to polish more of the piece overall.
I ordered small “sequins” from adafruit recently that are flat LEDs. I got them in blue alongside a battery pack that can supply up to 6v. I admittedly like projects that will have a “second life” so to say and I wanted to make my second version of Blep be able to function as a light up plush because I thought it would be cool 🙂
Progress is going well, and I’m happy there were no issues with the body part of the template.
The animations are quite cute and do a great job of showing the dynamic between Blep and Ece. Friendship is so fundamental for people (and animals) and it’s really neat how you conveyed it here.
More sounds are always good! I absolutely love this concept I think it’s really sweet. I also really like how the colors are charming, calming and comforting, kind of similar to how pets view their owners.
Absolutely love this piece! The art overall is amazing and I love the colors especially. Also the little lizard friend is very cute and reminds me of my own pet 🙂 Adding some cute sounds to go along with the images would be adorable.
I find the input to be very unique to your project. How did you decide on the characters relation to input versus output?
I wanted the user to get the idea that they were looking into Blep’s memories. I need to add more audio to support this idea though.
As for the animations, I wanted to map them up to approximately where they are located on Blep’s back as they appear on screen 🙂