Category: lirec
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A week in Stockholm
The Mobile Life Centre in Stockholm is an interdisciplinary lab that does serious research on unserious activities and comprises computer scientists, interaction designers, sociologists, psychologists and game designers. They are also part of SICS, and are partners with FoAM on the Lirec project. Last week I was lucky enough to work with them for 5…
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Germination X: Game design in pieces
The current focus for Germination X is encouraging collaboration between players, with the subjects of pemaculture and companion planting deeply interwoven into the gameplay. It’s important to avoid the normal problems with “educational games” where the subject matter is bolted onto some existing game. This is rarely a successful strategy. Firstly players now are grouped…
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Germination X: player progression and surprises
Slowly Germination X gets less like a prototype and more like a full game, lots of new stuff this week – as this is the first online release of the work done over the past month. Players can now pass items of fruit to each other or spirits as gifts (by dragging fruit over messages…
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Run your own Germination X server
We are in the process of moving the Germination X game to a new server, which gives me the chance to properly document the steps required to set it up – this is based on a clean Debian Squeeze 6.0.1 box on Linode. Step 1: Get the source and Clojure installed sudo apt-get install subversion…
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Germination X – designing for cooperation
Over the last week I’ve been designing and implementing a lot more game mechanics for Germination X which are needed for an upcoming visit to the Mobile Life Lab in Stockholm. The more interesting ones involve some direct player – player interaction. The thing I’m trying to balance is keeping the central design simple (what…
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manSEDANse 2011
I was honored with an invitation to present some thoughts on open source/free software at this year’s manSEDANse festival in Tampere. It was nice to talk about the connections between Germination X, Naked on Pluto and Betablocker DS with some quick live demos, and catch up on the developments of open hardware projects such as…
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Lirec meeting in Bamberg
Last week was another Lirec meeting in Bamberg, where I was able to present an in depth description of how Germination X works. I also had the chance to talk with SICS/mobile life lab (one of the other project partners) about how we can take the game forward with the aim to provide some studies…
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Emotional Colour Map
This is the emotional colour map for Germination X. It’s a 22 by 8 sized image, with 8 colours for each OCC emotion (those we haven’t done yet are white). From left to right, these represent: LOVE, HATE, HOPE, FEAR, SATISFACTION, RELIEF, FEARS_CONFIRMED, DISAPPOINTMENT, JOY, DISTRESS, HAPPY_FOR, PITY, RESENTMENT, GLOATING, PRIDE, SHAME, GRATIFICATION, REMORSE, ADMIRATION,…
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GX – messages, colours and continuous worlds
A big update for Germination X today. The main new stuff includes: The process of moving around the world is now more continuous, as the land is split into sub-tiles that are loaded 9 at a time. When you move out of the central tile the 3 at the back are discarded while the 3…
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New plant spirits and dandelions
A large part of the recent work on Germination X has been finalising the character design for the plant spirits. We need something which can exhibit some connection with the permaculture plant layer the spirit represents along with a way to express emotions with the restrictions of the browser platform. This is an image from…