Tag: Games

  • Cricket Tales released

    Cricket Tales is an ambitious citizen science project. 438 days of CCTV footage from the Wild Crickets Research group – the only record of wild behaviour of insects of it’s kind. It turns out that insects have more complex lives and individuality than we thought, and the game is a way of helping uncover this…

  • AI as puppetry, and rediscovering a long forgotten game.

    AI in games is a hot topic at the moment, but most examples of this are attempts to create human-like behaviour in characters – a kind of advanced puppetry. These characters are also generally designed beforehand rather than reacting and learning from player behaviour, let alone being allowed to adapt in an open ended manner.…

  • Some algorithms for Wild Cricket Tales

    On the Wild Cricket Tales citizen science game, one of the tricky problems is grading player created data in terms of quality. The idea is to get people to help the research by tagging videos to measure behaviour of the insect beasts – but we need to accept that there will be a lot of…

  • News from egglab

    9,000 players, 20,000 games played and 400,000 tested egg patterns later we have over 30 generations complete on most of our artificial egg populations. The overall average egg difficulty has risen from about 0.4 seconds at the start to 2.5 seconds. Thank you to everyone who contributed their time to playing the game! We spawned…

  • Procedural landscape demo on OUYA/Android

    A glitchy procedural, infinite-ish landscape demo running on Android and OUYA. Use the left joystick to move around on OUYA, or swiping on Android devices with touchscreens. Here’s the apk, and the source is here. It’s great to be able to have a single binary that works across all these devices – from OUYA’s TV…

  • Project Nightjar: Where is that nest?

    We’ve released a new game for Project Nightjar called Where is that nest? This is an adaptation of Where is that nightjar?, but the variety of species of birds is greater, some of the nests are much harder to find than the birds were so we added two levels – and a hall of fame…

  • Where is that nightjar?

    The first Project Nightjar game is online! It’s a perception test to see how good you are at spotting the camouflaged birds – a great use of the photos the researchers are collecting in the field, and we can also use the data as an experiment by comparing our timing when searching for birds with…

  • Slub at the Deershed festival

    Deershed is a music festival designed to accommodate families with lots of activities for children. Part of this year’s festival was a Machines Tent, including Lego robot building, Mechano constructions, 3D printing and computer games. Slub’s daily routine in the Machines Tent started by setting up the Al Jazari gamepad livecoding installation, a couple of…

  • Visual livecoding environments: big screenshots

    Some decent sized screenshots of al jazari and scheme bricks rendered with fluxus’s tiled frame dump command. This set includes some satisfyingly glitchy al jazari shots – not sure what was causing this, I initially assumed it was the orthographic projection, but the same artefacts occurred on the perspective first-person robot views, so it needs…

  • Teaching at the Düsseldorf Institute for Music and Media

    Last week I was kindly invited by Julian Rohrhuber to do a couple of talks and teach a livecoding workshop alongside Jan-Kees van Kampen at the Düsseldorf Institute for Music and Media. Jan-Kees was demoing /mode +v noise a Supercollider chat bot installation using IRC, so it was the perfect opportunity to play test the…