dave's blog of art and programming

Category: Games

  • Plasticine architecture

    A patafungi building site for the Aniziz game. The shapes have been inspired by Siteless – an architectural book I absolutely love by François Blanciak. It contains 1000 ideas for building forms inspired by time spent in different cities around the world. This could be a great starting point for all kinds of ideas for…

  • Aniziz: Keeping it local and independent

    A large part of the Aniziz project involves porting the Germination X isometric engine from Haxe to Javascript, and trying to make things a bit more consistent and nicer to use as I go. One of the things I’ve tried to learn from experiments with functional reactive programming is using a more declarative style, and…

  • Mycorrhiza

    A mycorrhiza is a symbiotic (generally mutualistic, but occasionally weakly pathogenic) association between a fungus and the roots of a vascular plant.

  • Aniziz (the soil)

    The borrowed scenery game has been named ‘Aniziz’ – from the 12th century Lingua Ignota used by Hildegard of Bingen. The term means “the soil” and represents the game’s role in the wider project, for nurturing plants found in the city, as well as the mapping element. It’s working much more like a proper multiplayer…

  • Borrowed Scenery – spacesuits for plants and full screen scrolling in HTML5 canvas

    Lots more of Theun’s new artwork which is coming on quickly over the last few days has been added to the game, the glass bubbles (more precisely cloches) are space suits for the plants from our world to live in, in their new patabotanical environment. Information about tagged plants is printed in a Voinych Manuscript…

  • 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…

  • Map rendering with OSM and HTML5 canvas

    This week I’m trying to get as much code done on the borrowed scenery game as possible – today, fixing the map rendering. I decided to load map tiles from OpenStreetMaps directly rather than using OpenLayers. This is done quite simply, accessing the millions of pre-rendered png files with URLs in this form: a.tile.openstreetmaps.org/z/x/y.png Where…

  • Clay mushrooms

    More work on the Borrowed Scenery project and a first screenshot, experimenting with different visual styles. I’m trying modelling clay to get a 3D look on the fungi and using Theun Karelse’s mockup characters for player avatars. The floor is being built out of map tiles of Ghent pulled from OpenStreetMap, using the OpenLayers API…

  • Borrowed Scenery 1.0 – joining imaginary and physical spaces

    FoAM is building a story for Electrified III: The Responsive City in Ghent in September. It’s called Borrowed Scenery 1.0 and follows on from our previous Borrowed Scenery 0.1 in the same city in 2009. The story will be built out of parts arising and inspired from the groworld project – human plant interfaces, but…

  • 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…