Post-It Art: Ms. Pacman

It started when I tried to accomplish something in a software 3 times in a row and failed. Out of frustration I went looking for a creative outlet.

Earlier on I had purchased some small square Post-It notes, so I thought maybe I can add to the wall that already has a giant thumbs up sign on it with some more Post-It art.

I did Ms. Pacman first.  I had a limited supply of colors and my initial idea of doing the Mario 1-Up Mushroom wasn't going to work since I had no black squares to work with.

One of my colleagues colored a white square in with a black sharpie to create the single black mole for Ms. Pacman.

After lunch and some meetings, I came up against another road block, so I went back to the wall and added the blue ghost and cherry with the little "white" dots.

White wasn't going to show up on the white wall so green was used instead. I also originally did the blue ghost when it's in "edible" mode, but it was a bit small and the resolution wasn't fine enough to reveal the squiggle of its mouth.

At the end of the day, I went back and replaced the blue ghost with a "normal" one that is bigger in dimension, so I could have the resolution I needed to give it a proper shape and also proper eyes.

With this version, I didn't need the mouth, which worked much better. Using the same technique as earlier, a colleague helped me color in a few white squares as black for the eyes.

Connecting the dots (literally) with the original thumbs up on the wall, that was done by my colleague many weeks before.

Finally, another colleague mentioned it might make sense for the ghost to be looking back at Ms. Pacman. I agreed and we went about moving the eyes so it looked to the upper left instead of the bottom right.  A master piece in 8-bit pixels, if I may say so myself. :)

Tetris on the Green Building

One of the best MIT hacks in my lifetime (so far) is when MIT turned its Green Building into a live Tetris game.  I had the privilege of playing the game on the Green Building and it is by far one of the most memorable experiences I've ever had playing any game in my life.  

The action is all captured in this almost 4 minute video.  I would have lasted a lot longer if there weren't so many "dead pixels"! Some offices had their lights on, which interfered with where there might be blocks, while other offices were completely dark.  Those "dead pixels" interfered with providing feedback of where there is an existing block, which proved to be my downfall early on (around the 1 min mark).

It just goes to show how important providing feedback to the user is when it comes to interface design.