The Science Fair Project

The Science Fair Project: Prompt 1: Describe how the choice of colors works in the game.

Within The Science Fair Project, the color of the avatar, sprites and other interactive objects are depicted by the color white. Within every room of this game and across every color scheme, white clearly stands out which leads the player to assume the interactive capabilities of those things colored this way relative to other colors within the rooms. Within the house, the borders of the rooms as well as non-interactive details of the rooms are colored in dark red, and a light brown background is throughout. In general, these two colors are somewhat similar and do not necessarily contrast each other. The light brown background color allows the dark red to stand out, but not too much, which allows the house to feel dark and not as cartoony or fake as say a dark straight black would create. When stepping outside, the grass background is a muddy green with dark gray boundaries, bike, car, and other details. The contrast between these two colors is pretty prominent, and it truly differentiates from what is important and what is not in the scene. Moreover, these dark grays are harsher to look at than the colors of the house, and almost make the outside objects created by it bland and unimportant due to the prominence of the white of the interactive sprites. Lastly, the store has a light gray background with a black outline for the counter and cashier. The contrast is not that great between the black and gray and the white and gray due association of gray with both colors since it is their mix; however, the black and white contrast is prominent. This overall scene seems very bland and almost tells the player to hurry and that there is not much to do within the room other than to buy the science supplies. Altogether, the colors between the rooms do not associate that much besides the white as well as the gray from the outside and at the store. The contrasts of the house’s colors compared to the contrasts of the outside colors and store colors make the house seem more important and realistic with the not-so-cartoony look and convey this sense of exploration due not only to the rooms but to the use of color in showing where hallways, doorways, and overall exits may be. Overall, in each room there seems to exist one background color that is either complemented by or not complemented by the secondary color, a secondary color that forms other non-interactive objects which are easily differentiated by interactive objects due to the prominence of the white against every color within every room of the game.

Prompt 3: The rooms are primarily organized to be a top-down floor-plan type view of a house and its front yard. Having the setting be a house made it easy to distinguish exits, as well as what paths could be taken. Furthermore, the clear and different paths made exploring a point of the game, where the player can venture from room to room and interact with various household objects/items. This also made the transitions fluid and in real-time. The only exception is the one exit/transition where you get in the car and it takes you to the store, which would of course include some sort of skip in relative time, as well as traversing some more distance than the other exits that just take you from room to room within the house. The room for the store is laid out with a long horizontal counter-top spanning from wall to wall that has an array of items for the player to interact with, behind the counter is what appears to be a worker saying “Hello,” which helps to distinguish to the player where exactly they are. Once you find the object you need along the counter, you can transition back to outside the house by leaving the store. While there is room for the player to explore the front yard of the house, the store, and each room of the house, there is still an overall linear plot, where the game has you search for specific objects in the room, making it so that your exploration is not aimless.