Session 3 Screen capture:
This week I completed Session 3. Session 3, as I planned before, is a room with radio which has 2 modes. These modes have different atmosphere and different content. I edited all the soundtracks, photos and coded the radio UI in Gamemaker. I went for a cold toned, retro style for the photos in the white mode and complete black&white pixelated for the photos in the dark mode.
I added the materials and it came out just the way I wanted. I mainly spent time on making the radio work because I want it to have a realistic feeling. The soundtracks all start playing the moment the user enters the session so when the user switches channel, he/she does not hear the audio starting from the very start ( just like a real radio). I feel like I'm learning so much as I keep doing my project. Because I'm strict about the certain effects I want to achieve, I had to step into very unfamiliar areas. But it feels very good when I finally figure out something.
I re-recorded the piano sound for the "dark" mode of the radio. Previously I just had random piano sounds but now the two songs in the dark mode correspond to the ones in the other mode. I included the perfect recordings in the white mode, and included recordings with a lot of mistakes in the dark mode. I wanted to convey the feeling that not everything is perfect, easy and glamourous. There are failures and frustrations hidden under the surface.
When I asked Adrian for some suggestions, he helped me a lot with designing the UI of the radio and the animations of the buttons. The animations I had earlier were not natural and it was difficult to think through especially because of the subtle differences between inverted colors.
He also suggested that to have a even more dramatic presentation, I could change the background color for the dark mode to a bright color that makes the user feels a little uncomfortable. I tried changing it to bright pink because of the color theme of the story but I'm still a little bit unsure about that.
I wish the user can sit down and listen to each item in the channel carefully because there are a lot of information :^)