Category: Games
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Bumper Crop
Bumper crop is an android game I’ve just started working on with Dr Misha Myers as part of the Play to Grow project: “exploring and testing the use of computer games as a method of storytelling and learning to engage urban users in complexities of rural development, agricultural practices and issues facing farmers in India.”…
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Butterfly wing pattern evolution
I’ve been working lately with the Heliconius research group at the University of Cambridge on a game to explain the evolution of mimicry in butterfly wing patterns. It’s for use at the Summer Science Exhibition at the Royal Society in London, where it’ll be run on a large touch screen for school children and visiting…
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News from egglab
9,000 players, 20,000 games played and 400,000 tested egg patterns later we have over 30 generations complete on most of our artificial egg populations. The overall average egg difficulty has risen from about 0.4 seconds at the start to 2.5 seconds. Thank you to everyone who contributed their time to playing the game! We spawned…
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Egglab – meet Ms Easter Robot Nightjar and her genetically programmed eggs!
We’ve released our latest citizen science camouflage game Egglab! I’ve been reporting on this for a while here so it’s great to have it released in time for Easter – we’ve had coverage in the Economist, which is helping us recruit egg hunters and 165,000 eggs have been tested so far over the last 3…
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Thoughts on teaching programming with Minecraft and Python
Saturday saw the first dBsCode taster workshop, for budding programmers between 11 and 16. We set up 20 Raspberry Pi’s, which we networked together and used our new procedural Minecraft 3D shape primitives to build a number of projects in Python involving castles, spiders and an infinite house generator. Networking was very important – it…
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Self replicating structures in Minecraft
A little gallery of accidents and broken experiments. All the code here. A little island of original pristine environment in danger of being swamped:
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More procedural Minecraft architecture
More work on the Python teaching environment we’ll be using next week for the Minecraft workshop at dBsMusic. I’m working on various ideas for procedural architecture, using this as a way to demonstrate what programming is about – thinking procedurally/functionally. The code is online here – I’ll be adding some exercises and course materials over…
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Egglab – pattern generation obsession
I’m putting the final pieces together for the release of the all new Project Nightjar game (due in the run up to Easter, of course!) and the automatic pattern generation has been a focus right up to this stage. The challenge I like most about citizen science is that along with all the ‘normal’ game…
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Egg camouflage evolution tests in different nest sites
I’ve spent some time testing Project Nightjar EggLab: clicking on algorithmically generated eggs on backgrounds taken from nightjar nest sites and recording the time it takes for each egg. It’s designed for lots of people to play in parallel, but I wanted to test it before coming up with more gameplay mechanic ideas. The timing…
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Procedural landscape demo on OUYA/Android
A glitchy procedural, infinite-ish landscape demo running on Android and OUYA. Use the left joystick to move around on OUYA, or swiping on Android devices with touchscreens. Here’s the apk, and the source is here. It’s great to be able to have a single binary that works across all these devices – from OUYA’s TV…