dave's blog of art and programming

  • Naked on Pluto library projection progress

  • Germination X: striving for simplicity

    In late December the Mobile Life Centre in Stockholm ran the first focus test for Germination X, and last week I met up with them to get the feedback in detail. Even for a small study of 5 players, this was very detailed – but the broad conclusions were that the underlying ‘ecological model’ of…

  • Betablocker DS code patterns (part 1)

    Some useful Betablocker DS code patterns as used in common live coding situations. Firstly, when carrying out a sound check before a live performance it’s important to keep some kinds of sound engineers happy generating as many different sounds as you can so they can fiddle around with stuff – of course remember to turn…

  • MapReducing plants and players

    I haven’t been doing much work on Germination X lately, but we are now up to 101 players, and 766 plants alive at time of writing. Of the 101 players 60 of them are on the first “level” of planting ground cover plants, 24 are at level 2 planting shrubs and 4 have made it…

  • Serious/educational games interview with Kara Frame

    An interview with Kara Frame, who is studying Educational Technology at San Francisco State University. Please tell us who you are, your role in designing games and why you became interested in “serious games”? My background is in computer graphics programming for the games and film industries, but for the last 3 years I’ve been…

  • Naked on Pluto: Starting work on a “live world” projection

    Following on from the VIDA win, we need to work hard on Naked on Pluto’s gallery installation presence. Although we now have the news website style front page, we need to take the game externalisation to another level, and one of the things required is a realtime projection of the game world. This represents the…

  • GX: Intelligent butterflies etc

    Over the last couple of weeks Germination X has managed to attract 70 players picking and planting in a permaculture world, with plants now covering 92 5×5 tiles – watch out Zynga 🙂 This week has seen some more additions, firstly giving gifts to spirits has a large effect on their emotions positive and negative,…

  • Gameplay balancing and emotional turmoil

    Balancing is where you tweak games to get the right level of difficulty – doing this on a single player game is hard enough, but on a live game with active players its quite tricky. Germination X is currently too easy, which results in plants happily growing packed closely together (blocking subsequent players from planting)…

  • 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…

  • 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…