Category: Games
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Game designin’ (GX)
Before I can make full use of the characters in Germination X, I need to think about the game itself, the social aspects – and how this interacts with the theme of companion planting. This could be a very rich area to play around with, but it needs to start as simple as possible. I’m…
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Digital Arts @ Turku
This week I was kindly invited by media artist/game designer and inflatable installation maker Andy Best to help evaluate students on the Digital Arts course at Turku University of Applied Sciences. There was a lot of good work to comment on, much of it involving games or post production/animation. Some of the work is online,…
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FarmVille
At it’s height Farmville attracted 60 million players per month. This makes it the most played computer game in history, and not without good reason – I enjoyed playing it too. What continues to fascinate me beyond the appeal of the game itself is the worldview it presents regarding plants (and also domesticated animals) and…
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Germination X: Seasons and Video
As well as featuring a hi scores table (now making it into a real game!), we have most of Lina’s plants in the game, only the dandelion needs replacing from the older version. With the new artwork the difference between the seasons is much more apparent, for example autumn above and spring below. I’ve also…
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Germination X : Hand drawn sprites and artificial life
The next revision of germination x is live, currently testing some stack overflows I’m getting with clojure, but also running a load of new stuff. I’ve replaced the old cubes the world was built from with some hand drawn ones which are slightly wonky in a pleasing way. The plants are also now running a…
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Germination X – a shared garden
The live version of the game now implements a single online world shared amongst all players, and the simplest of multiplayer functionality – being able to tag your plants and see who planted the others. Most of the work was rewriting the prototype server written in Scheme to Clojure. but I’ve also added (currently rather…
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Germination X Update
This is another very limited test version of the game, now with a plant spirit character and new plants from our concept art. The player character has gone, you can grow plants by clicking anywhere on the grass. FAtiMA is still running on the server, but it’s not connected to the plant spirit companion any…
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Germination X – the next steps
Lina and I have begun work on the next iteration of Germination X which will be more playable than the demos we’ve been working on up till now. We are developing the look and building some of the underlying technology we need for the Pixelache event in March, lots more of this to come, but…
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Wonky Betablocker DS movie
More work on Betablocker DS. Note playback cues work (after spending some time scratching my head over the affine transformations on the nds). I find these essential for visual feedback when livecoding. I also appear to be maxing out the graphics chip, which fails pleasingly gracefully – stopping rendering rather than framing out – some…
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Machinima at Gamerz festival
My missile command livecoding film is being shown at the Gamerz festival in Aix en Provence as part of a collection of machinima and game related film. Photos by Luce Moreau, thanks to we make money not art, who have an article on the exhibition and interview with curator Isabelle Arvers.