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FarmVille
At it’s height Farmville attracted 60 million players per month. This makes it the most played computer game in history, and not without good reason – I enjoyed playing it too. What continues to fascinate me beyond the appeal of the game itself is the worldview it presents regarding plants (and also domesticated animals) and…
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Germination X: Seasons and Video
As well as featuring a hi scores table (now making it into a real game!), we have most of Lina’s plants in the game, only the dandelion needs replacing from the older version. With the new artwork the difference between the seasons is much more apparent, for example autumn above and spring below. I’ve also…
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Germination X: seasons & companion planting
Starting to get Germination X into shape for next week’s Pixelache festival and the plant spirit drawing workshop which we are doing as part of the groworld bazaar. Lots of new plants, seasons (a year lasts 10 minutes!) and some more complex rules to how well plants grow based on companion planting. Click on the…
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Coimbra Lirec meeting
Cnotinfor hosted the latest Lirec consortium meeting last week in the Portugese town of Coimbra. Cnotinfor are a company researching technology and education, more specifically a system called Little Mozart which teaches children to play music using a character displaying emotional behaviours based on research from the project. I presented the latest version of Germination…
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Naked on Pluto vs Mozilla
We had some trouble following a submission of Naked on Pluto to the Mozilla Game On competition. Aymeric describes the full story here, and it looks like a case of satire mistaken as the real thing, but it’s just a shame that we needed to go public with a blog post before we received any…
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Plant spirits moving and dancing
Two new plant spirit types, and they can now move and animate, driven by the fatima agent. They travel around the world tiles based on player activity and hover over or around the object causing them the highest emotional reaction. There is a basic attempt to show their emotional state via their animation – smooth…
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Germination X – Plant spirits progress
The FAtiMA minds that will be running the plant spirits are now receiving events from the world – i.e. plants growing, getting ill or starting to fruit affects their emotional state. These events are appraised by FAtiMA’s OCC model, which is named after Ortony, Clore and Collins who proposed it in 1988: “…, we would…
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Unleashed Machinima
Some nice photos of the Missile Command Machinima which was shown at Unleashed Devices in London last year. Thanks to Tint Arts. “Unleashed Devices is an exhibition of DIY, hacking and open source projects by artists who explore technologies critically and creatively. By reconstructing, remixing and reinventing everyday electronic devices, artists shift our vision of…
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Germination X : Hand drawn sprites and artificial life
The next revision of germination x is live, currently testing some stack overflows I’m getting with clojure, but also running a load of new stuff. I’ve replaced the old cubes the world was built from with some hand drawn ones which are slightly wonky in a pleasing way. The plants are also now running a…
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Germination X – a shared garden
The live version of the game now implements a single online world shared amongst all players, and the simplest of multiplayer functionality – being able to tag your plants and see who planted the others. Most of the work was rewriting the prototype server written in Scheme to Clojure. but I’ve also added (currently rather…