Tag: art

Caaargh Game Development Blog #3 – Complexity from Simplicity

In my last post a few weeks back I was pondering whether to add more complex track segments to the game (Caaargh!) as a way to make more interesting tracks. It must have been a good question, as it’s kept me occupied for the best part of a month.

In the end, I found I was able to generate many more, more-interesting tracks by making the component pieces even smaller and simpler than they were before.

Example of old style track pieces
Example of old style track pieces above
new_style_pieces
New style track pieces are much smaller

As part of this process I updated the scripts that generate these tracks to work with arbitrary directions and angles which also freed me up to use vertical space as well as horizontal in the game. This means tracks can now cross over themselves in interesting ways.

Track's can now vary in height
Track’s can now vary in height

There was a bunch of new modelling work to-do, and I can’t overstate how much I’ve been enjoying using Sketch-up to make these. It’s such a human friendly piece of software given what it can do, and it exports nicely enough to .fbx files to work with in Unity.

sketch_up_deadend
Modelling a deadend segment in SketchUp

The new track modelling work has let me fix up the aesthetic and practical (in game physics) issues that were bugging me with the original track pieces, and at the same time make the track a bit narrower which better suits the single-player game-play.

Here's the car relative to the track
Here’s the size of the car relative to the track

Here’s a quick sample of generating a bunch of random tracks of a specific length.

track_generation

There’s still plenty to tweak in here, but the next design decisions about tracks can’t properly be evaluated until some of the other game mechanics are in place, and what’s here goes through some more play-testing.

Also, banked corners looked fun, but didn’t play well. Sorry banked corners.

banked_corners

Messing with Processing and a black hole

I put together a Sketch in Processing this evening. It generates a canvas at whatever size you want, adds a black hole and a couple of thousand pixels that get sucked into the black hole with some simulated gravity. The final result is a bit like the image I had in my head when I started, so I’m happy with that. I would like it to be more awesome, but this will do for the time I have to play with right now.

I quite like the scratchy ‘pixely’ quality at ‘actual’ size, but that might be my nostalgia for older games and my taste in scrappy painting.

The code’s available over at http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/119499 where you can hit the page a few times and generate variations of the image.

blackhole

blackhole

blackhole2

Anyway, enough with this post as I should be doing some real studying now (which involves reading a play).

Critters Sketch in Processing

If your browser is up to scratch, here’s a little JavaScript based sketch from a current personal project…


This is some early code for a simple game I’m working on for the Coursera Creative Programming course (it’s my first time building a game rather than regular software).

These shapes are generated from a limited range of numbers, which can later be turned into a simple genetic code to define these critters.

I’ve hosted this on OpenProcessing.org, so you can get to the source-code etc.

http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/103410

On ‘We, the Web Kids’

Intel inside

I thoroughly enjoyed reading We, the Web Kids, and could probably have picked a quote from any paragraph to highlight it’s quality. But I’ve picked one in particular as it connects with one of the themes I’ve been writing around here for the last couple of weeks. That is: paying the artist. Like Piotr, I’m happy to pay for the art I love. And whether it’s a painting, sculpture, performance or book, I’d like to pay the artist as directly as possible. In this extract, he captures some of the motivations excellently:

“Why should we pay for the distribution of information that can be easily and perfectly copied without any loss of the original quality? If we are only getting the information alone, we want the price to be proportional to it. We are willing to pay more, but then we expect to receive some added value: an interesting packaging, a gadget, a higher quality, the option of watching here and now, without waiting for the file to download. We are capable of showing appreciation and we do want to reward the artist (since money stopped being paper notes and became a string of numbers on the screen, paying has become a somewhat symbolic act of exchange that is supposed to benefit both parties), but the sales goals of corporations are of no interest to us whatsoever. It is not our fault that their business has ceased to make sense in its traditional form, and that instead of accepting the challenge and trying to reach us with something more than we can get for free they have decided to defend their obsolete ways.”

Piotr Czerski (translated by Marta Szreder)

However, while the whole text resonates with me, if it were read as a manifesto, there’s one section I’d caveat before offering my support:

“To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others.”

That’s true; but it’s a blessing and a curse, and the subtle implications are important. The web offers us instant everything, and as with all new technologies, like clocks and cars and computers, it changes the way we use our brains. And the way we use our brains shapes the people we become. The example from Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows that always sticks with me (probably because it supports what I want to believe anyway!) is that the part of our brain used to imagine, follow and remember a complex idea in detail, say when reading a novel or studying a topic in great detail, is the same part of our brain used to feel compassion.

And it is up to us how we exercise our brain.

Hat tip to Ade for flagging up We, the Web Kids.