dave's blog of art and programming

Category: Games

  • Ouya development experiments

    The Ouya is a tiny game console which is designed for promoting indy games rather than traditional high budget productions. It’s cheap compared to standard games hardware, and all the games are free to play at least in demo form. It’s very easy to start making games with as it’s based on Android – you…

  • Project Nightjar: Where is that nest?

    We’ve released a new game for Project Nightjar called Where is that nest? This is an adaptation of Where is that nightjar?, but the variety of species of birds is greater, some of the nests are much harder to find than the birds were so we added two levels – and a hall of fame…

  • Visualising egg pattern genomes

    A couple of screenshots from the upcoming Project Nightjar citizen science game – the genetic programming pattern generator is now working in a simple test framework, and even with myself as the only player at the moment, it’s gradually producing eggs that are harder and harder to find against one of the background images from…

  • More procedurally rendered eggs in HTML5 canvas

    The first Project Nightjar game was a big success, with 6 thousand players in the first few days – so we’ll have lots of visual perception data to get through! Today I’ve been doing a bit more work on the egg generator for the next citizen science camouflage game: I’ve made 24 new, more naturalistic…

  • Where is that nightjar?

    The first Project Nightjar game is online! It’s a perception test to see how good you are at spotting the camouflaged birds – a great use of the photos the researchers are collecting in the field, and we can also use the data as an experiment by comparing our timing when searching for birds with…

  • Sonic Bike Hacklab Part 3: The anti-cloud – towards bike to bike mesh networking

    [Continued from part 2] One of the philosophies that pre-dates my involvement with the sonic bikes project is a refusal of cloud technologies – to avoid the use of a central server and to provide everything required (map, sounds and computation) on board the bikes. As the problems with cloud technology become more well known,…

  • Slub at the Deershed festival

    Deershed is a music festival designed to accommodate families with lots of activities for children. Part of this year’s festival was a Machines Tent, including Lego robot building, Mechano constructions, 3D printing and computer games. Slub’s daily routine in the Machines Tent started by setting up the Al Jazari gamepad livecoding installation, a couple of…

  • Genetic programming egg patterns in HTML5 canvas

    Part of the ‘Project Nightjar’ camouflage work I’m doing for the Sensory Ecology group at Exeter University is to design citizen science games we can build to do some research. One plan is to create lots of patterns in the browser that we can run perceptual models on for different predator animals, and use an…

  • Visual livecoding environments: big screenshots

    Some decent sized screenshots of al jazari and scheme bricks rendered with fluxus’s tiled frame dump command. This set includes some satisfyingly glitchy al jazari shots – not sure what was causing this, I initially assumed it was the orthographic projection, but the same artefacts occurred on the perspective first-person robot views, so it needs…

  • Plutonian Botzlang

    Plutonian Botzlang is a new language I’m working on for a commission we’ve had from Arnolfini and Kunsthal Aarhus. The idea is to make the Naked on Pluto game bots programmable in a way that allows them to be scripted from inside the game interface, able to inspect all the objects around them and carry…