Category: clojure
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Borrowed Scenery tendrils reach out
Some serious connecting work going on with borrowed scenery for joining physical and imaginary worlds together. A new Boskoi database is up and running, giving us a place to put all kinds of story elements and plants found in the city. Boskoi uses the Ushahidi platform, which provides an API the game is now using…
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Algorithmic fungi patterns
Central to the borrowed scenery game is an ecosystem of fungi that players will grow to feed the plants found by foragers in the city of Ghent using Boskoi. These fungi will work differently from the plants in Germination X, partly in response to some interesting game testing feedback – the fungi will only grow…
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Websockets vs HTTP
A bit of R&D this morning into websockets. Previous games like Naked on Pluto and Germination X have made use of standard HTTP protocol for their client server communication. This is easy to set up (as a newbie web programmer) and fine for prototyping and proof of concept – but has some serious problems with…
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Germination X: Player characters
After another code sprint on Germination X, I’ve added player characters (avatars) to the game. Based on the falmouth focus group feedback this seemed one of the major things missing that players felt would improve the game. The character design came from the Mandrake plant, which has been cropping up in groworld projects for some…
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Run your own Germination X server
We are in the process of moving the Germination X game to a new server, which gives me the chance to properly document the steps required to set it up – this is based on a clean Debian Squeeze 6.0.1 box on Linode. Step 1: Get the source and Clojure installed sudo apt-get install subversion…
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Germination X – designing for cooperation
Over the last week I’ve been designing and implementing a lot more game mechanics for Germination X which are needed for an upcoming visit to the Mobile Life Lab in Stockholm. The more interesting ones involve some direct player – player interaction. The thing I’m trying to balance is keeping the central design simple (what…
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Evolving musical bytecode #3
For the next attempt in BetaBlocker bytecode evolution I wanted to favour patterns that had a rhythmic nature by measuring them with this function: (defn freq [l n] (defn _ [c] (cond (>= (+ c n) (count l)) 0 (= (nth l c) (nth l (+ c n))) (+ 1 (_ (+ c 1))) :else…
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Evolving musical bytecode #2
Following on from the first BetaBlocker genetic algorithm bytecode experiments, in addition to the “most different notes” fitness function I added a similar calculation for the first derivative (ie. the difference between the notes in time order). This was an attempt to steer the evolution away from simple scales and into more complex patterns. (defn…
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GX – messages, colours and continuous worlds
A big update for Germination X today. The main new stuff includes: The process of moving around the world is now more continuous, as the land is split into sub-tiles that are loaded 9 at a time. When you move out of the central tile the 3 at the back are discarded while the 3…