The Report for Rabbit’s Secret

Shanshan Luo

33089540

March 19, 2008

Rabbit’s Secret is built up in two main parts: a computer-based part, and an installation (a small space, a house model, and background music).

Computer-based Part

Illustration is used to describe the text. Traditional illustration is usually paper-printed; therefore, the reader’s relationship with it is that of a passive observer [1]. In my work, I re-create the traditional illustration [*][2] as a computer-based interactive illustration. Audiences actively explore the story using the mouse to interact with them. It is like a simple computer game, which involves interaction with a user interface and has an object; finding out the “secret”. Although each scene provides a hint about where the key point(s) should be clicked, it is not easy to find it, and move from one scene to the next one. From my observations, the audience usually spent more time with the images than expected. My game was inspired from a type of puzzle game, the “Escape the Room” [3]. The object of Escape the Room is to find a way to escape from a mysterious room utilizing a point and click style to play.

The computer-based part is created in Processing. Below is the main functions used in each scene:

Scene 1: button, mouse follow.

Scene 2: button, mouse dragged.

Scene 3: button, click count, frame rate, sequential images.

Scene 4: buttons, 3D rotate, click account, timer.

Scene 5: button, array, matrices.

Scene 6: button.

For this implementation I had to solve three notable problems. The first was about frame rate. After asking 5 friends to play the game, I realized I had to reduce the frame rate in scene3 to make the wall images less dazzling. However, all other scenes’ frame rate was changed also. Therefore, I had to give a separate frame rate value for each scene. The second problem was about buttons from different scenes intersecting each other and confusing the programme. To solve that, I modified the Button Class, adding one more parameter; a “parent-scene” to which each button belongs. The last problem is screen return. I found that the button functions were unavailable when I went back to the first scene from the last. That was because the program was getting confused by the many “if” conditions, and was running the scenes as a loop in a very fast way. Calling the “update()” function inside the “button press()” allowed the programme to control the order of the “if” conditions.

Installation

It is a small closed space that only one viewer can go into at each time, and the viewer has to lie down on the ground to view the screen. This idea gets inspiration from personal experience: we always hide our secrets in a narrow safe place, for example, as tiny as our heart or as safe as mother’s uterus. Therefore, I encourage the audience to crouch like an embryo and look at the screen through a peephole like a real peeper. The whale and trees images create oppressive feelings. There is also a big rabbit on the top of the space, which looks like peeping the audience from outside. The rabbit is telling us that whoever peeps may turn into being peeped.

References

[1]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illustration

[2]. The Secret Inside The Forest. Jimmy

[3]. Red Room:http://www.fasco-csc.com/works/crimson/crimson_room_e.swf

Green Room: http://www.fasco-csc.com/works/viridian/index_e.php

Blue Room: http://www.fasco-csc.com/works/bluechamber/index_e.php

Whit Room: http://www.fasco-csc.com/works/white/start.swf

Black Room: http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/thegrudge/site/flash/main.swf

[4]. The Big Three Questions of Game Design.

http://robosnake.blogspot.com/2007/04/big-three-questions-of-game-design.html

Index

The illustrations of the space (1)

(2)

scene 1

scene 2

scene 3-1

scene 3-2

scene 3-3

scene 3-4

scene 4

scene 4

scene 5

scene 6

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[*]Pieces of the illustrations come from Jimmy’s private work “The Secret Inside The Forest”.