More wonderfully surreal interactive from one of the original and best, VectorPark (the online playground of Patrick Smith). His latest is “Feed The Head”, and its in a similar vein to his previous playthings (and other online point-and-click-for-weirdness quests such as Samarost), this time your task is to put things into (and pull things out of) a bemused head. Great fun.

Also up and about is Acrobots, another smaller-scale plaything with one of his recurring characters (reminds me a bit of Tower Of Goo by 2D Boy’s Kyle Gabler.

The realm of extreme optimisation and demo-scene coding is an exotic place - with its capital in Finland (although possibly now in California now that Will Wright played pied-piper), and its results often seem to defy any sense of appropriate scale. My only attempt was a 5k flash game called minimalemmings years back - great fun to do but hardly rocket science. Since the era of procedural generation, programmable graphics cards and ubiquitous 3D, the plasma fields and chrome text have progressed to hardcore dynamics and ultra-compressed scenes and games comparable to production level graphics (such as the produkkt# kregier).

One of the latest is Sumitori Dreams, by Peter Sotesz . The graphics maybe be extremely basic but the amount that is packed in is quite absurd (its only 87k). Not only does it include rigid body physics, destructible bodies (love the way it feels to smash up the blocks), but also self-righting bipeds (as seen in Sony’s QRIO project). Mr Sotesz is clearly a very talented individual.

As a game, its fun to play with, but it does seem like the idea definitely came after the technology. As a playspace/sandbox its ace - to play the hidden mode, destroy the wall by firing through the right most gap in the bars.

Via fun-motion.

(For a more recent graphics-focussed demo - check out farbrausch’s 177kb Debris)

I’ve been working on a project with a couple of friends for many months now, and I’m proud to say that its finally live (and naturally this being the internet… in beta).

The site is called Bountee, and its a site that allows illustrators and graphic designers to upload their designs online to sell to the shirt hungry public. Each individual shirt is printed to order, allowing us to have a huge catalogue and no restrictions to the number of shirts a designer can upload. Each designer retains all the rights to their designs and can charge as much markup as they like (and get paid via paypal).

So, fancy doodling a few shirts and making some money? Go and play!

Kurt Vonnegut passed away today, something that has affected me more than I thought it would. He is one of my favourite authors (if not my favourite), I have always had a huge place in my heart for what he has given me. The first book of his that I read was Breakfast of Champions, and since then I’ve not found anything that can compare to his writing style.

Of all the books of his I have read, the one that tops my list of his is definitely Sirens of Titan, the most cynical book I have read, but still so bizarrely uplifting. If I could write I would want to write like him. He is a hero to me, and it is sad to see him gone.

I’ve been trying to read more game design papers recently, especially since the blog-distributed slides and notes from this years GDC are trickling through, and one thats really struck a chord is Miniature Gardens and Magic Crayons by Chaim Gingold. Gingold is currently working at Maxis as a key part of the prototyping group within the Spore team (what a job) and is described as Will Wright as “The Toymaker” of his design team. I’m fascinated by the rapid prototyping process employed by Gingold and others on the team (previously including Kyle Gabler of the inspirational Experimental Gameplay Project, now of Indie startup 2DBoy) and their ability to tackle the enormous problems that Spore must continue to burp up. Anyway more on prototyping later, back to the Thesis.

The first theme of the paper is Miniature gardens. Chaim’s discussion compares the design of a game world or playspace with similar practices in such areas as the design of Japanese gardens and playgrounds. They afford the designer the opportunity to strategically select and compose elements to represent a small scale representation of a bigger phenomenon or environment (perhaps not unlike Epcot, except not shit). For the player or user they allow the safe exploration of an abstracted world governed by simple, learnable rules - one that has been designed to be consistently engaging and intriguing, and to inspire wonder and exploration in the player.

The paper discusses a number of different techniques that can be employed to promote certain qualities in a play-space (such as the technique of miegakure, or Hide-And-Reveal, which is used in Japanese gardens to create the illusion of a larger space than is actually present - employed in games by placing intriguing objects in unreachable places in the distance).

Theres not much point in excessive paraphrasing, far better to read it yourself.

Bank holidays were made for this. On Monday I got a chance to pop down to the excellent Kinetica Museum at Spitalfields Market in London after the heads up from Chris, to see their latest show dedicated to the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre. Like a lot of people, my first introduction to Cabaret Mechical Theatre was as a child, visiting their exhibition in covent garden. I have to admit that at the time, they couldn’t really compare to the neon lights and giant imported videogames at Funland in the Trocadero, but now its a totally different story.

What a wonderful show. Its so refreshing to see work on display that evokes wonder and excitement rather than tired worn-out ideas and aesthetics. Theres no pretentiousness or posturing and in many ways the objects are so touching - so delicate, like miniature limericks or poems and they seem to be have been crafted with real love and for the creator themselves rather than the audience. My favourites were definitely by Paul Spooner.

If you live in or near London, do go and see the exhibition - its on until the 5th of May. There are also a series of talks and beginners workshops if you fancy getting your hands dirty (well covered in sawdust at least).

Following on from the last post on Seymour Papert’s Logo programming language comes a new effort from Microsoft entitled “Boku”. Led by Matt MacLaurin of Microsoft Research’s Creative Systems group , it provides a play-space populated by a number of different characters and objects, and has been designed to introduce some of the fundamental concepts in computer science to the very young.

Each of these characters can be controlled by developing simple behaviours from building blocks that represent events (eg sensory inputs such as seeing a colour) and actions (such as movement). These building blocks are assembled on a rack, and by creating composites of these atomic parts, complex behaviours can be created quickly and easily. Its been in development for around four months and appears to use the XNA framework, allowing it to run on a retail Xbox 360 (making it ideal as a relatively cheap, living room education tool). It was recently shown at the O’Reilly E-Tech conference. From the official microsoft description:

Boku uses a novel, high-level programming paradigm within a 3-D gaming world on the Xbox 360® to introduce children to creative use of the computer. Boku’s programming model is extremely simple as it does not use a textual language or wiring diagrams. Kids use simple behavior cards to enable a small virtual robot to navigate its world and achieve specific tasks. The goal is to provide a gentle introduction to some of the foundational elements of creative programming to children who may not yet be ready for the complexity of classical computer languages. The user is exposed to behavior arbitration, generality, representation of an abstract state, real-time experimentation and feedback, simulation, sensors, physics, and message passing. The programming environment is integrated in an attractive gaming world and controlled entirely via an Xbox 360 game controller.

Theres a good demo from the Microsoft Techfest here (look around 38 minutes in).
Via Alice.