I recently asked a question on the shmups forum, how many games have a 'perfect score'. I was referring of course to shmups, but the question could apply to many games. Snooker has a perfect score, 147 achieved by potting all 15 reds with 15 blacks for 120 points then all six colours for a further 27 points. Darts has a perfect score, or rather a perfect set of throws to meet the 501 target. Most contemporary videogames have usually done away with scoring altogether in ... [More ..]
Well, I have finally managed to find the appropriate academic context for my continual research interest in gaming. Over the next three (yes I am going to try!) years I will be studying for a practice based phd in the area of digital games as a performative framework. Just to outline a little more of what this might mean I'm pasting a small extract of some of my preparatory writing. Im not sure if I will expand theis blog to keep track of my notes, ... [More ..]
Artists Daniel Waillis and Davina Drummond develop community art projects for cultural institutions like Tate and southbank centre. Not a Bad World, Is It? was a collaboration with 20 young people from north, south, east and west London to make a new piece of artwork to be projected on to the side of The Royal Festival Hall. The artists invited viewers to contribute to the film by asking them to ‘describe the most beautiful thing you have ever seen’ via a text message. These statements then ... [More ..]
I've been playing with coding my own simple spring/chain type physics for a game idea. My application generates a series of 'genetically grown' insect-wormlike creatures that then swim around exhibiting nice elastic spring type animation. The structure of their 'bones' is similar to the 3d skeleton builder i wrote, using a bilateral spine model in a dawkins biomorph sort of way. There are some physical limitations to how the limbs can grow and the rigidity of the bones is also influenced by their location in the skeleton. The ... [More ..]
A year or so ago I wrote a game in C++/OpenGL as part of a little prototyping experiment we ran in the 8453 collective. My entry was a greyscale pixel-art platform puzzler. The gameplay was sort of a cross between chu chu rocket and lemmings. The general flow and interaction was really quite fun and the editor was almost as fun as the game itself. However it looked pretty bad.... My friend Alison helped me out immensely by drawing some beautiful pixel art for the characters and ... [More ..]
I have recently been working with Southbank Centre London, in collboration with Bernadette Roberts and Gaia Nova to produce large scale generative animations for their multiprojector screen setup in the festival hall. I wrote an interactive animation program using C++/openframeworks that would generate a large range of minimalist and hypnotic animations using simple geometric forms and colors. I designed the system to run live, with scheduled events triggering the software to animate to specific states for film playback or text display. In this way it was hoped ... [More ..]
I thought it would be useful to compile a short list of texts I wrote for my "Thinking games" blog. These peices were produced as part of the output of my independent research supported by the Huddersfield DRU ( a joint venture between the University and The media centre). Unfortunately, during the consolidation of several blogs they became a little subsumed, so I'm making this post to collect some of the the longer ones together in a single place. I always intended these notes to ... [More ..]
Untitled Application is an interactive sound peice comissioned by MAAP and SAM for the Leeds Expo. Its an open air work hosted on one of the BBCs 'big screens', a range of large outdoor LCD displays in major cities of the UK. The peice itself was produced for the LEEDs Expo, a festival of sound art.
The work is a two part application. The visual part is written in C++ using openframeworks and opencv. It takes a council CCTV camera as a video feed and performs ... [More ..]
Another quick commercial break. In the last few months I've been working along with odessadesign on a microsite for the V&A museum for their current exhibition Telling Tales. We were really pleased to be chosen (up against some good competition) and we managed to incorporate some intriguing navigation ideas and a fun interactive exquisite corpse game.
To provide navigation for the three main exhibition areas we designed a flash movie that used parallax scrolling and camera techniques to create a 3D stage-set environment that the user could ... [More ..]
This post contains some brief notes that I have nowhere else to keep for the time being. They will hopefully form part of a longer research idea.
What is entropy?
Noun
1. Formal lack of pattern or organization
"entropy increases as matter and energy in the universe degrade to an ultimate state of inert uniformity"
As referenced by the scientific laws of thermodynamics entropy is the reduction of matter and energy to non-complex forms with no structure or relationships. Where many chemical and biological processes attempt to combine primal constituents into more diverse ... [More ..]
I am generaly not a huge fan of scripting languages. I tend to view everything except C/++ as window dressing that isn't 'hardcore' enough. While I'm aware that this is a ridiculous stance I just can't help myself scoffing when a new API emerges with some custom scripting language attached that allows us to send OSC messages from ubuntu installed on a jailbroken toaster to a bluetooth enabled clown. However, in a recent spate of commercial work I have been forced to employ a significant amount of these ... [More ..]
I've always been interested in the relationship between gameplay and musical performance. Theres a remarkable structural similarity between certain game systems/mechanics and compositional ones. There is also a risk/reward/challenge aspect that is core to both practices. Anyway, for a short talk I took part in for the Leeds Evolution Festival I wrote a quick augmented chess/draughts app.
The software (Openframeworks) I wrote keeps track of a matrix of grid points that are mapped to the grid cells of a chess board. The application then samples the color ... [More ..]
I recently listened to Jon Blow's montreal lecture on how narrative and gameplay generally contradict each others operation in videogames. As usual its an insightful and thought provoking talk, however it did make me question how much the definition of these two aspects could be flexed in order to improve their collaboration. It seems inevitable that attempting to meld traditional narrative with a strict ludic progression is going to be difficult. As Blow hints, other forms of transmission can be used to project 'story' that don't rely on ... [More ..]
AudioPool is a project based around a selfsequencing pool of sounds and the representation of those sounds in 2d space. Although this is a fairly old project, Im slowly porting items over from my old website and i thought this deserved a copy. (dont ask if it fails to run, it was written on windowsME!)
The pool in question is the surface of the computer screen. Sounds are taken from a number of different sources: On-board compact discs, microphone inputs, internet queries. These sounds are then placed in ... [More ..]
Pure Data is a modular dsp system by Miller Puckette.
See www.pure-data.org for more details
You must have PD to run any of these patches.
PD Drum machine
An 808 style drum machine.
Up to 10 user sample instruments, up to 200 bars.
drum-machine.zip (280k) with samples
PD Pulse Grain Generator
A pulsar like grain generator (single grain train) with automated/ controllable properties.
Envelope size/shape, Grain spacing, Grain Pitch, Grain Pan.
pulse-grain-generator.zip (50k)
PD Example Semi-Generative tune
A simple set of patches demonstrating simple generative composition techniques.
For newbie users to check ... [More ..]
I was asked by the South Bank Centre to work with a childrens workshop group who making papercraft butterflies. Initially they wanted a simple slideshow of the finished butterflies, I suggested a more dynamic method of presentation that would make the childrens work 'come to life' in a more exciting way.
To achieve this I wrote a few applications using the Openframeworks library suite. The software captured a webcam snapshot of each finished butterfy which was then texturemapped onto the surface of a 3D butterfly. These ... [More ..]
I've been playing with the quilting nine-block pattern generator idea to create some flower heads. The heads are made out of a random selectin of predefined pixel leaves/petals (thanks alison!). And then arranged according to the nine-block pattern rules. The program actually builds a new OpenGL texture and then writes a 16x16 grid of patterns into it. This is so I can use them later as a sprite sheet in my app. Following on from this stage the sofware 'grows' a pixel plant in realtime, using a ... [More ..]
Weevil was a group project that I've worked on over the last eight years or so. Initially involving Ambrose Seddon, Jonny Pilcher and myself as main contributors, the project gradually settled on the collaborative input of myself and Jonny. After producing and performing as a solo electronic act I wanted to try and apply my experimental production techniques to more acoustic work. Weevil was born out of this cross-fetilisation, inspired by bands like MBV, Bark Psychosis, Hood and the Notwist.
After a few self published releases we ... [More ..]
Pixelmap is a system developed to produce simple geometric patterns based on a simple object language. By using a short list of methods and keywords users can trigger and manipulate a large number of graphic elements onscreen. Pixelmap reacts to messages sent via UDP/TCP. This allows the system to work across networks and operate remotely from the machine that is the triggering source. Any application can be the source for these messages, as long as it supports UDP/TCP methods (such as Max,Pd,Supercollider).
The intention is for the ... [More ..]
Vendor Refill was the name I mainly recorded/released/performed electronic music under for about 6 years.
I started writing material on the trusty old ST with a dodgy Yamaha synth an old s2000 akai samper and a bunch of guitar fx pedals. I gradualy aqquired a bunch of synths (nord micro, ATC chameleon, Novation nova.. ) better desks, monitors etc and eventually moved over to mostly total digital production in PD/MAX Logic/Cubase and some of my own software/filters. I also wrote a dozen or so tracks for nanoloop ... [More ..]