Latest updates on the City in a Bottle project, creating a game world for virtual creatures.
We have released our game development engine. It is available in the new "Download" section on the website. NodeBox for OpenGL is a free, cross-platform library for generating 2D animations with Python programming code. It is built on Pyglet and adopts the drawing API from NodeBox for Mac OS X (http://nodebox.net). It has built-in support for paths, layers, motion tweening, hardware-accelerated…
From August 23 to 25, the E-Culture Fair 2010 will be showcasing innovative projects in the fields of creative industry, research, education and media art at the Dortmunder U. ECF will take place during ISEA (International Symposium for Electronic Arts) in Dortmund, Germany. We will exhibit interactive installations at ECF with City In A Bottle, NodeBox and Dark Matter (partner project, Tom Heene,…
We held a workshop on saturday and one of the things that came out of there was "The moving forest": a first experiment with parallax scrolling. I simply used the grouped layers of a Photoshop mockup to scroll. The effect breaks down at the edges of the canvas but zoomed in, it's pretty convincing. The music is from the soundtrack of the game Riven , by Robyn Miller.
Recently, blogs have been ablaze with the stories of Tim Langdell's gaming company (The Edge) sueing a small 2 man company (Mobigame) for releasing a game called "Edge" on the iPhone. The story goes that, although not having released any new games for 15 years, they have been persecuting a lot of people for using the word "Edge", including a 1997 film with Anthony Hopkins. And now they're after…
Funny. I've stumbled across a game that uses the same principles of emergent behaviour, but targeted at one single item of gameplay, namely weapons. Galactic Arms Race is a multiplayer spaceshooter. Nothing special there, until you come to the weapons section. The lasers have not been designed, but are generated by the AI. And it provides creative solutions for killing enemies! Check it out: -…
How do you design an entire forest with the least amount of effort? You lay down the principles and let the computer do the rest of the work for you. Keeping in line with the mechanics of the rest of the game, we are letting the game engine generate the trees in the forest by itself. What we will do is make a library of tree bark and define rules for tree-like skeletons. The skeletons are created…
Technical note. The game engine for City In A Bottle is now open source (GPL). The code is hosted at the NodeBox development site . For people that are already familiar with NodeBox, the engine has adopted the same API (i.e. drawing commands) as NodeBox so it's very easy to get started. The game engine is written entirely in Python and built on top of Pyglet. Graphics are rendered in OpenGL. So…
Last week, we were invited to participate in an international arts expo in Denmark. So we loaded up the car and drove whole the way up to the north. It took us 12 hours! Turnout was better than expected and we sure generated a lot of interest. We met some really sweet and interesting people there. But more importantly, we now have our presentation fixed and ready. So if ever we need to introduce…
Our first creatures workshop was an opportunity to work with Tim to integrate Pure Data into our Python runtime, written in Pyglet. This small movie gives an overview of the underlying creatures engine. What's important here is not how it looks, but how all the pieces fit together. We now have a bare-bones visual framework and editor, an animation system, and a link to the underlying sound system.…
For the next three days, we are "workshopping" in the Champ d'Action studios, our partner in crime for sound and music. Champ has introduced us to Tim Vets, a musician/composer/installation artist. Check out his work at http://timvets.net/ We'll be working on the interaction between sound and vision. Give our plants and insects their own voices, so to speak. We'll let you know when our children…