Category: Games

  • GX: Player statistics-o-rama

    Some stats on Germination X player activity since November: Total num players: 310 Time spent playing total: 181.80 hours Average player return duration: 9 days Players who returned for periods longer than 30 days: 21 players Average num sessions per player: 2.47 sessions Average num fruit/seed picked per player: 12.53 fruit Average num plants planted…

  • New game design

    I’m working on a new game as an art/science collaboration, and thought that it might be interesting to try the technique of making a board game first. The idea is not so much to make it work first time, but use physical pieces to figure out possible rules and try them without thinking about limitations…

  • Truffle Blocks

    A new project running here that brings together Germination X’s HTML5 game engine with Google’s Blockly in the spirit of Fluxus and particularly Scheme Bricks. I’ve had a plan for working on a visual programming language for browser based games (and got someway to implementing Scheme Bricks with the Naked on Pluto art installation). Blockly…

  • Drawing plant spirits in Brussels

    Some pictures from the Germination X plant spirit drawing workshop, part of FoAM‘s contribution to Open House Brussels, a public invitation for people to visit the artistic groups and labs in the city. The plant spirit drawing system has improved a bit from last year’s workshop at Pixelache Helsinki, being able to upload to the…

  • Next week: Plant spirit drawing & social network livecoding

    The next few days are going to be hectic – a train powered scramble between cities for various activities. Firstly I’m taking part in FoAM’s Open House event on Saturday in Brussels: Enter a rarity cabinet of people and experiments: a lively display of human-plant hybrids, tasty table conversations, crisis-proof clothing and other curios in…

  • 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…

  • GX: Player activity animation

    Four months of players picking, planting and sending gift fruit to spirits and each other compressed into nearly 7 minutes. If you’ve had a go recently, I hope you see yourself in a starring role! It’s super to see the ebb and flow of players, and explosions of activity around the focus tests.

  • Germination X player activity viz

    The rendering of the whole thing is taking a long time, but here is a shot from a visualisation of player activity from Germination X showing picking, planting and gifts from players to each other or plant spirits. You can display a lot more sprites with fluxus than in a browser!

  • Germination X graph of solutions

    Last week I posted the big graph of problems based on feedback from the Falmouth Loading Bar focus test. I went through each area building up a list of possible solutions – the general idea being to find solutions that might solve more than one problem at a time. I now have quite a reasonable…

  • Germination X graph of problems

    During the Germination X focus test I asked the participants a set of questions in 4 areas based on work we had done at SICS mobile life in Stockholm. This was useful as although there was a lot of information (and a load more free form feedback after the questions) – at least there was…