In 2015 at Hongik University, I took a class focusing on making videos, but after I heard the brief and expectations I felt I could do better than just making videos. I aimed to use videos to make interactive games.

In the first project, I asked two friends from my dormitory to chase each other. I recorded many different scenes. At the beginning I was trying to plan the order and potential different flows in the chasing story, but it wasn't easy. We didn't have enough time, and the dormitory corridors were in use all the time, so while we were recording, people were appearing in the background. Because of these reasons we recorded late at night, capturing as much footage as we could without worrying too much about the story flow. Another challenge was my friends' acting. I didn't give them clear directions about what to do or how to behave in front of the camera, and because of this some scenes were longer than they should have been, but later all these problems were solved in the post-production phase.

For the first project I used the Vidzor platform. They described their platform like this: "A full-service platform to create and distribute interactive videos that engage and convert target audiences across all online channels." I guess they didn't realize someone would use their own platform to make games. It was an HTML5 based platform where we were able to add links and buttons to bring up the next scenes and videos, so with this approach I turned my interactive chasing footage into an actual video game, and it had 3 different endings.

Unfortunately the Vidzor platform closed, but they had already kept my video for showcase purposes. I even got a mail from the CEO but for some unknown reason I didn't reply. Anyway, I am thankful to them for keeping my video for such a long time.

In the second project, I wanted to make a game like Guitar Hero, where while playing notes, you could see videos playing in the background. I was still somehow prioritizing the videos.

For this project, after a long search I ended up with the Construct game engine, which was web based and had a user friendly interface for non-coders. After long trial and error and a lot of research, I realized it wasn't easy to make a rhythm game, because I had to have some music knowledge and even had to do some mathematics for the programming.

I learned some limited knowledge from Reddit, Stack Overflow, and similar sources, and tried to make it again. During this process I replanned the idea and turned it into a "Dance Dance Revolution" style game, because it was much easier compared to Guitar Hero mechanics. In detail, it was just 4 different directions and a flat 2 dimensional representation without the depth that Guitar Hero had.

I prepared the basic mechanics but my coding knowledge wasn't enough. I asked my computer science major friends for help, nearly begged them, got promises, but never heard back. Two days before the deadline, I decided to code everything by myself manually without any algorithms or shortcuts. At this point I just focused on making one music video work. To map the moves and directions to the music, I probably listened to and watched the music video more than 300 times to match the dancing direction moves in the game.

After finalizing the first video, I added a second one, but this time I wrote an algorithm with some randomized timed directions, which worked better than I expected. The video content was also a mix of clips, so it somehow worked well and players couldn't even tell the directions were coming randomly.