Acey's Weekly Report 3/18 - 3/24

1. What was planned?
Find a way to store puzzles.

2. What was done?
I found a way to store the puzzles that does not involve 41x41 points of data. Hurray! It only requires at most 2 x number of moves to complete the puzzle. This will make coding and storing the puzzles much easier.

Fixed a few bugs with the array representation of the puzzle.

Allow the second graph to display the puzzles based on the stored puzzles data.

3. Problems encountered?
No real problems other than realizing I was outputting my array in the wrong order. I thought I was storing it wrong; nope just system.outed in the wrong order.

4. What did you learn this week?
If your tester is wrong it is really hard to find the problem. I spent more time than needed looking for a bug that did not "really" exist because my toString method was reversed.

5. What's planned for next week?
Get at least one puzzle in (likely more but need one to do next part).

Be able to check current progress against goal image.

Provide feedback to user about which points are wrong.

Save High Scores. (May be pushed to next week)

6. Hours worked
20

Creativity:
Creativity is basically doing something completely new or making a tweak to an existing idea that has not been done in that way before. Creativity in games is becoming harder and harder as more and more is done. This is one of the most interesting aspects of creativity: what is and is not creative is constantly evolving. What would have been extremely creative even 3 years ago is now boring and mundane. This is a result of another interesting property of creativity: it varies based on ones personal experience. I'll explain with a story.

As a child I was in Odyssey of the Mind. This program sought to foster creative thinking in students by having them find a "solution" to a given challenge. There were different categories students could enter but I always entered in the acting one. Basically given a prompt we had to come up with a creative and humorous play. In addition to the play all costumes, stage, and props had to be made by the students, take up a small amount of space, and be made under a certain price value. This forced the students to think creatively to meet all these requirements. Over the many years I did OM me and my group slowly picked up "creative" tricks. However we started using these tricks year after year. Beyond the first year of their use were the tricks creative? To us using them no we had used them all (well a lot of them) the year before. But to the judges who had not seen last years competition it was all fresh and new and extremely creative. I also remember watching one performance by another group and just being blown away by their script. It was extremely creative and funny. After it was over I talked to my Mom (who also watched it) about how great I thought it was and it turns out it was almost punch line to punch line from a TV show I had never seen. This is really the heart of the phenomenon of creativity. It completely depends on past stimulus.

This extends to games as well. If someone had been in a coma for the past 40 years woke up and made Super Mario Brothers without any outside input that would be amazingly creative... to him. Everyone else would have seen it and been unimpressed (with the game not the fact he coded super Mario brothers after a coma). No matter how creative a person is they MUST have a breadth of knowledge about whatever they are working on. Otherwise an amazing idea they come up with might have already been done before. It also helps as a spring board to creative ideas. Changing a winning formula in a way that has not been done before can be creative if it varies enough. Majora's Mask was BASICALLY Ocarina of Time with the time system expanded. Even the most popular titles must change something and do so in a new way or eventually they will die off. This is of course a challenge to keep those core elements that the fans know and love while still making creative and positive changes.

The only exception to this needing to change to be creative I can think of in recent history would be Mega Man 9. Although it added nothing "new" in the main game the very fact it was so uncreative made it creative. Who would even think of developing a new NES game for the Wii. And the inclusion of the NES graphical glitches, now that was creative. Of course if they do it again with 10 then it WONT be creative any more. I would even go so far as to say if they tried the same thing with the X series and SNES graphics it would not be creative at this point. That is not to say I will not buy it and love it, it just will not be creative. I guess that is the entire point of this long rant. Things can only be creative AT MOST once maybe twice if you wait long enough. More often than not things will be creative ZERO times especially if you did not realize it had already been done before or if your change was not different enough from the preexisting baseline.