Final Project, Part 1: Getting an Idea

     For our final project, we don't actually have a specific assignment. Instead, we get to choose pretty much anything that ties into the topics we've covered in this course. Unfortunately, I didn't have any specific idea in mind, so the lack of a specific focus here was actually rather daunting. I'm also working alone for this project, so I can't really get ideas from a collaborator. And as a further wrinkle, we have to scope this project to be completable by Thursday, December 14 in parallel with our map project. While being expected to be making a smaller product is kind of nice, it also rules out a lot of interesting possiblities because they would take too much time
     Thus, I decided to start by trying to find something that I would find personally relevant. I am a CS and Interactive Media and Game Development (IMGD) double major, and am an active member of the Game Development Club (GDC) here at WPI. In my free time I sometimes dabble in making games and drawing pixel art (and occasionally voxel art, which is essentially just 3D pixel art). Clearly, it seems like I should do something related to game design or the IMGD major, and ideally it would use a type of art I am familiar with.

Idea #1: A Logo

     My first thought was to do some sort of logo to represent the IMGD major or the GDC. I could try, for example, to stylize the acronym IMGD into a game controller. However, I not only have never had any experience making a logo, but also am almost completely unfamiliar with vector graphics tools like Illustrator (which would be ideal for a logo). Thus, I opted to reserve this idea as a fallback in case I couldn't come up with anything else.

Idea #2: An Infographic

     My next idea was to make an infographic showing the different tracks in the IMGD major. You can be an IMGD Tech major or an IMGD Art major, and while the two have a pool of shared required classes, they rest of the classes needed are significantly different. To further complicate matters, the IMGD Art track has 4 different variant, each with slightly different sets of courses: students can have no concentration, a Visual Art concentration, a Design concentration, or a Technical Art concentration. This naturally can be a bit confusing, so I thought that creating an infographic which compares them could be useful to students. I wanted to represent the IMGD major as a game console with two controllers attached, one for each major track, as this is immediately recognizable as related to games. The shared courses would be visually represented on the console itself (perhaps in a pie chart showing distribution by subject), while the track-specific courses could be indicated by the button layouts of the two controllers. There could also be a memory card connected to the console to symbolize the humanities and arts, social science, physical education, and IQP graduation requirements, since those can be applied (or, metaphorically, "plugged in") to anyone's major (as a memory card can be moved between individual consoles). I would make the console and controllers as a voxel model, and I could use pixel art for the title text as well.
     This idea seemed rather promising. It would be using software I was very familiar with and a type of art I am fairly confident in. I knew I could find all of the information it required from the IMGD department website, so hunting for data would not be an issue. However, as I examined the different tracking sheets I realized that this was not as feasible as it sounded, especially in the scope of this project. The portion of the requirement that differs between the tracks is about 16 classes, and that alone would be a lot to convey on a controller. Add on all of the other shared classes, and you have a very busy, complicated infographic. If I had more time it might be possible to pull together, but I don't think such a graphic would fit well in the scope of this assignment.

My sketch of this design was as follows:

Idea #3: A Font

     Once again I was back to square one. Fortunately, I quickly got a new idea that would be much more feasible, but would still relate to both my interest and abilities: I could make a pixelated font designed for coding. In order to serve this purpose, the font must have several key properties: it must be monospace (to ensure that code lines up consistently), its characters must be easily readable and clearly distinct, and it must incorporate punctuation and other common non-letter symbols (since many of them are used in code). I am choosing a pixelated style because I personally really like the look of pixel art, and because it is commonly linked to games, which require significant amounts of coding to create. The audience for this font would be people like me who have an interests in coding, pixel art, and the most prevalent combination of the two: making games.

     Before I really start on drawing the font, I need to know what existing monospace and pixelated fonts do so I can think about what elements I do and don't what to incorporate into mine. Some examples of monospaced fonts include:

          

          

     The most distinctive trait across nearly every monospace font I can find is that, regardless of whether the rest of the letters use them, they put serifs on very slim letters like i and l to make them fill more of the space, so I should definitely look into including those in my own font. Fixedsys, which actually appears to be a pixelated monopace font, makes almost every line 2 pixels wide, rather than just one, and it never has lone pixels connected only by their corners, both of which I feel help improve its readability.

     One other pixelated monospace font I'm very familiar with is the one used in Pico-8. For the uninitiated, Pico-8 is essentially a virtual game console you can make and play games for, which I happen to be a huge fan of. One thing I've noticed is that people have rather mixed feelings about its font choice. Here's what it looks like:

While the font doesn't particularly bother me, I have heard complaints from people in the community that some of the letters (especially B) are hard to identify, and I can definitely see what they mean.  I'll even readily admit that detailed characters like @, #, $, and & are difficult to make out. The whole reason this font has issues like that is that it is designed so that every character is 3x5 pixels, which is absolutely tiny. It is pretty much necessary for Pico-8 because of the 128x128 pixel resolution it runs at (even in the editor), but for other applications this is needlessly restrictive. Pico-8 is also kind of an odd case, since it only lets you type in lowercase letters. Its font appears to use almost exclusively uppercase ones (with certain exceptions, notably n being lowercase), but the characters themselves are technically all lowercase. Many coding languages are case-sensitive, however, so I would want to differentiate upper and lowercase letters in my own font.

After looking at these fonts, here's the list of what I've decided I want mine to do:

• Distinguish between upper and lowercase letters
• Include common symbols and punctuation in addition to letters
• Use serifs at least on the i and l
• Make diagonals more than 1 pixel across to improve readability
• Don't constrain the font to too small a pixel scale. 8x16 (with 4-5 pixels of space reserved for both ascenders and descenders) should be adequate.

References:

List of monospaced typefaces. (2017, December 5). In Wikipedia. Retrieved December 12, 2017, 

     from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monospaced_typefaces