Connor Frietzsche's Innovator Website

My Innovator Project

Originally, my experience with the innovator unit was one that wasn’t looking that great. I set out to create a YouTube channel with Nicolas Faurot which would showcase small animate shorts we made. After about a month of animation both myself and Nic knew this was not something that we wanted to present. Our animation was badly done and overall sloppy and not something we were proud to show to the people of freestyle. So with a very small amount of time we switched our project to showcase a game that we had been making as a fun side project together. The switch was probably the best decision I made at freestyle because it led me to my favorite project. On this website you will find a link to the game and some of the art I designed for the game and other aspects that I developed.

To play our game go to "diericx.us"! Enter in an email and your desired username and password. Next go to that email and follow the instructions it provides. Once you have done all that refresh the game's login page and enter JUST the username and password, the email is no longer necessary! Enjoy!

The Rat

One of the first things that I designed for our game was this rat. It started out as a joke where I had drawn a stepped on rat in my design notebook. Upon showing it to Zac and Nic they both thought it would be a great addition to the game since our art style was pretty abstract and weird. Below you can see a picture of my illustrator file during the process of creating the rat.

Login Interface

The login interface. This, along with the messaging terminal, was hands down the hardest thing I designed for the game. I had so many ideas of it being super intricate and beautiful but as most game designers like me have learned, it is extremely difficult to make things look good and function well. Although I coded the actually interface in HTML which we use at freestyle, I had to learn to integrate that into other coding languages that I was previously not familiar with. The final product wasn’t beautiful but it gets the job done and only glitches out and breaks some of the time which I count as success!

Messaging Interface

Similarly to the login interface, I found creating this to be very difficult. I learned so much more about the development of websites and games alike from this little bit of production however. Originally we thought it would have been stupid to have a messaging system because of how many internet “trolls” there are, but I had extra time towards the end of the project and thought I would give it a try. It isn’t anything special but it doesn’t have any problems and allows players to send text messages to each other whenever they want.