« Secret Guardian Center » By Wan Hua Li ID: 40200887 For Pippin Barr
Project 1 CART-263 Fine Arts (Computational Arts Department) Concordia University
What: This project is a virtual secret guardian. The idea behind this not to create a realistic pet owning experience since it is responsibility and sadness free. The user’s secrets are stored and they can be accessed every time, as the guardian keep track to the date the secret was stored. It becomes a journal de bord.
The program: The user is asked to choose the pet’s name and a password for it to be accessed other times. The program then generates a random animal and it’s forever (or until one change local storage). Every time the user comes back, the animal has a different mood and outfit, but the profile and secrets remain the same, adding an archival dimension to the program.
Who: Suits for one in need of impartial and loyal company and have some secrets to store.
Original program: Virtual pet that watches over your website when you are away. The animal’s mood and hunger level decrement. The user need to feed and play with its guardian to keep its mood up. Coins increment by intermittence. No work never!!!!!! You can change your guardians outfit and room.
Upgrade: New layout and theme (secret guardian rather than just a virtual pet, allowing more « engagement and involvement » with the pet) With annyang() librairy, the user triggers its guardians trust by saying « I promise », enabling an alert to add a secret. Say « show » to show the user’s list of secrets, and « hide » to mask it. The user can also call its guardian, say « hello », « I love you » if thats not too weird and it should respond. With json librairies, the animal has randomly generated thoughts and mood that changes every visit. The guardian’s identity is also defined by lists of json files. The program access the user’s local storage to store its randomly generated data and the secrets. The guardian wears a different outfit every visit.
Why: For my mid-term project, I thought I’d be interesting to upgrade a program I have already started before rather than from scratch. The original project was purely an html-css/javascript technical exercice, a copy from Geocities’ virtual pet (was to allow space for technical learning).
For the context of this project, I was curious about the idea of starting not from scratch, but to add-up to an upgrade a program. It felt like an other type of exercice, brain, logic and logistic. I could understand more now the importance of commenting codes and organization; the linearity of programming and the cause/effect or « global » dynamic between steps rather than a local one.