dave's blog of art and programming

Category: groworld

  • Building a mobile patabotanical instrument

    Modding the boskoi android app for borrowed scenery, simplifying the interface and adding some patabotanical flourishes. Trying different designs with mockups: The results so far:

  • 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…

  • Borrowed Scenery tendrils reach out

    Some serious connecting work going on with borrowed scenery for joining physical and imaginary worlds together. A new Boskoi database is up and running, giving us a place to put all kinds of story elements and plants found in the city. Boskoi uses the Ushahidi platform, which provides an API the game is now using…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.