I ended up with more of a virtual world or virtual ecosystem than a video game. I ran out of time to put probably the most important thing into the game - game mechanics. Also no time for sound, the player has very little agency in the world, and there are no win or lose conditions.

Overall it was a lot of fun to build though, and I got some pretty neat new technology for jsGameSoup out of it, namely the isometric camera library, and a lightweight vector math library.

GGJ was also really fun just because of the social aspect of being crammed into a room with like minded people for 48 hours. Can't wait for next year!

Got some sleep. Lots of on the TODO list for today. About 7 hours left. :)

I have a reasonably concrete idea of where I am going. Hopefully there will be time to iterate on my idea and "find the fun".

inspiration here

Here is my itinerary:

• Wed Apr 20 - Arrive LAX
• Thu Apr 21 - Arrive NYC, attend NYCPatchingCircle
• Sat Apr 23 - Give the "Pd as your embeddable audio engine" workshop at NYC Resistor please sign up now!
• Sat Apr 23 - My pal Zachary Cale is having a launch party for his new record that night
• Mon Apr 24 - Arrive San Diego for "Puredata Reception with Miller Puckette, UCSD colleagues and students"
• Tue Apr 25 - Van it up to LA where the festival continues
• Fri Apr 29 - Give the "Pd as your embeddable audio engine" workshop in LA
• Sat Apr 30 - "Puredata Inside Out" panel with Miller, Hans, Natacha, Theron
• Sat Apr 30 - Take part in "Music with Miller Puckette and Friends" concert/party
• Sun May 01 - Flight back home (arrive home the 3rd)

For Infinite 8-bit Platformer fans this unfortunately means that the beta-builds must go on hold for a few weeks. There is one more network bug that was uncovered recently that I need to fix before releasing the builds, so that probably won't happen until I return home in early May. That will teach me to make promises and deadlines when it comes to spare time software projects.

If you are a tech/maker/software/puredata/infiniteplatformer fan/geek/contractee and are located in these times and places and want to catch up for a beer in between festivities, feel free to contact me.

Someone painted this [legal] piece as part of the recent William Street market festival. I am pretty taken with it. Sorry about the dodgy photo.

• Take photos with phone.
• Email photos from phone to an address on my server, which forwards:
• To a gmail address, where it goes to Google Buzz.
• To a special Wordpress email address which posts the pictures to the blog.
• The Wordpress thing also posts the pictures on Twitter and Facebook.

What I love about this was I didn't have to write any code to make it happen, but it still uses open source components and my own server. It's also ridiculously convenient which is very important when you have a newborn. I don't have to rely on some horrible corporation (they are just some of the end-points where the stuff arrives). I am a pretty huge fan of things which involve writing less code.

If you like images, feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed. I promise it won't all be photos of my wonderful daughter. :)

Now I am going to post some drawings I scribbled.

PS Here is another cool internet thing someone did for selling stuff on the internet without writing any code. It came from Warren Ellis' blog.

PPS another thing is what I am reading and sharing on Google Reader, which is here.

Hope you enjoyed these drawings of my ultimate music-making dream setup. My apologies to anyone using a screen reader.

Nonetheless there is something deeply profound and kind of humbling about holding this delicate little robot in my hand. I've spent my whole life creating virtual things - computer programs, graphics, music - and now it is possible to use the exact same skills to produce something who's physical structure may well outlast that of my own. Walking through Roman ruins earlier this year I realised that there is something about hard physical matter that is so important. Seeing a marble carving of some guy's face which has outlasted his original face by so many thousands of years really drove it home.

Last year I also read "Matter" by Iain M. Banks and although it didn't grab me as much as some of his previous books, there was an interesting argument about virtuality from one of his characters. The essence of the argument was that we don't inhabit a virtual universe overseen by some creator or creator race because any sufficiently advanced entity or culture would not allow the terrible things that can happen to sentient beings in our universe, to occur. It's sort of a meta-ethical argument saying that we can't be anywhere other than at the top of the stack of turtles, if the ethics of highly evolved intelligences are always consistent.

On a related note, this blog post makes the case that in software development the execution of an idea is much more important than the idea. I have come to believe that this is true in general. Because we now live in this highly populated and deeply connected age, ideas have become cheap. Real things, done things, executed things, are better than virtual things and ideas.

This decade is going to be fascinating because of the increasing protrusion of the virtual into the real and the modification of the real by the virtual. Bring on the self configuring household ornaments built of programmable nanotech, such as a flower which has as many petals as there are emails in your inbox.

Virtual things are ok, but real things are better.

PS If you like these you can also order them from my Shapeways profile.

Name                Chris McCormick
Registration Number xxxxx
Destination         Fremantle
Number of Boxes     2

Box - 1

Number Description                                     Purchased Value
8      Books                                           UK        40
15     Books                                           Australia 20
2      Art prints                                      UK        75
4      Clothes                                         Australia 10
2      Vinyl beanbag covers                            UK        50
1      Pack of business cards                          Australia 0
1      Clock                                           UK        14
1      Air mattress pump (electric)                    UK        5
1      Midi controller (electronic musical instrument) Australia 75
1      Blanket                                         UK        4
1      Drum machine (electronic musical instrument)    UK        50

Box - 2

Number Description                                     Purchased Value
2      Books                                           Australia 10
2      Handbags                                        UK        20
9      Pairs of shoes                                  Australia 60
20     Clothes                                         Australia 20
1      Hat                                             UK        4
2      Plastic toy pidgeon                             UK        5
4      Vinyl records (bowie)                           UK        4
10     Photos (personal)                               UK        0
5      Theatre programmes (personal)                   UK        0
10     Fridge magnets (personal)                       Australia 0
16     Birthday/Christmas/Anniversary cards (personal) UK        0

So long, London. Until next time!

This screenshot is as far as I got during the latest GameJam, which has been running in my home town, Perth. I joined remotely from here in London, but unfortunately I just didn't manage to squeeze in the time to make the game I was hoping to. I did manage to advance the MinimalistPlatformer codebase quite a bit further than it was towards the larger platformer game I have cooking away in the back of my mind though, so that's quite positive. Hopefully I'll get some more time to continue this work, and maybe even produce some binaries of my GameJam entry at some point.

If I had time to make a game right now, this would be it. Basically it looks and plays a bit like Asteroids, but the rocks don't fly around crushing you - they hang still in space, and you shoot the coloured ones to get minerals from them. It's multiplayer and set in a persistent universe, so I guess that makes it an MMO. You can fly up to other people and talk to them, trade items with them, etc.

I remember the intense excitement of the first time I played a MUD, back in the mid 90s. It wasn't the game element of it that excited me - it was the exploration and social elements. I guess I am a fan of virtual worlds more than games in that respect. I'm not that interested in grinding.

Asteroids TNG would be a bit like Diabolo, but in space and with vector graphics. That is to say, there are some asteroids that you can land on, and when you do, the game turns into a Roguelike with one short 'dungeon' per asteroid, and simple vector graphics instead of ASCII graphics. All of the monsters would be futuristic alien sounding monsters, and instead of wands and scrolls you would find rayguns, data nodes, and nanotech stems, and instead of armour you would find field generators and shielding, etc. You get to keep the inventory of things you find in the asteroid 'dungeons', and you can trade these items with other people. Later there would be space stations where you could dock to meet up with people.

The whole thing would be procedurally generated using Perlin noise to generate an infinite asteroid map, and Rogue-like logic to generate the asteroid dungeons. Lately I have been reading and obsessing over the source code of Donny Russell's AGB Rogue, which is a conversion of the original BSD Rogue for the Gameboy Advance, and probably my all-time favorite Rogue. It goes with me everywhere on my Nintendo DS. The code is incredibly unclean, but it's fun to look at the probability tables and dungeon generating functions to get an insight into how they balance the game.

The music would be chippy as hell.

Won't someone give me a wad of cash to make this social roguelike space MMO? I swear I will port it to Nintendo DS, iPhone, web, Xbox360, widgets, gadgets, screenlets, Windows, MacOS, Linux, and the Wii, and make you millions of dollars.

It can be summed up as a cross between the fish-and-leaves toy in Electroplankton, Crayon Physics, and The Incredible Machine. The idea is that users of the game can make "composition sculptures" by dragging various elements, each of which make a unique type of sound, onto the canvas. The sounds that each element make are triggered by tiny pinballs which are shot from cannons and bounce off the elements. Complex sculpture compositions can be set up where the balls bounce from element to element creating chains of different sounds, even music.

User Interface

The user interface is pretty self explanatory. Mousing over the strip down the left hand side causes the panel to slide out, and then elements can be dragged off the panel and onto the canvas. There is no separate run mode vs. edit mode; the game is always running and as soon as a cannon is dragged onto the surface it will start shooting little pinballs. When the user does a mouse-over on elements that are on the canvas the control point squares appear. Clicking and dragging control points allows the user to edit the parameters of each element. For example, the piece of bamboo can be rotated, and it's length and position changed. As it is made longer the "tock" sound that the bamboo makes will become deeper. You could place several pieces of bamboo in the path of the pinball, each of varying length to create a sequence of different notes.

Ideally the canvas part of the UI would be vector graphics and hence zoomable so that you could focus in on the parts of the sculpture that you are working on, and then zoom out to see the whole thing working like clockwork. Maybe there could be a "follow ball" mode when you click on a passing pinball.

Elements

The cannon is the start of every composition as it is where the pinballs originate from. Control points allow the user to modify the position, direction and power (size) of the cannon. An additional control point allows you to change the length of the spiral at the centre of the cannon, which sets the speed at which pinballs are shot out of the cannon. This corresponds to the basic tempo of a piece of music. Different cannons can have different tempos of course.

The clock has a hand which ticks with the same frequency as the nearest cannon to it. There should be some kind of visual feedback to show the user which cannon the clock is associated with. Pinballs bounce off the hand of the clock and this allows you to create pieces where pinballs go in multiple directions at different times. The clock features control points for changing the length of the hand, the position and rotation of the clock, and the number of stops on the clock's face. It might be a good idea to try having a separate spiral to control the tempo of the clock independently of any cannon. Testing will reveal which method is more intuitive and useful.

The hit clock is just like the clock, except that it only 'ticks' when a pinball strikes the centre circle. Other than that it has pretty much the same control points for size, rotation, position, and number of stops. This allows you to create more complex pieces where a ball can strike a hit-clock after a long sequence to change the direction and flow of other pinballs.

The leaf is inspired by the leaves in the Electroplankton fish-and-leaves game - it makes a plucked string sound when the stem of the leaf is struck by a pinball. The control points on the leaf allow you to change the length, rotation and position of the leaf. The length of the leaf changes the taughtness, or pitch of the string. The sound for the leaf should vary in a procedural way if it has multiple excitations in rapid succession, which goes the same for the following audible elements. An algorithm such as the Karplus-strong algorithm would work well for the the leaf, and is faily easily implemented.

The bowl contains water and makes a 'plock' sound when pinballs fall into it, and a gongish sound when struck on the sides. The bowl's position, width, and height can be changed with control points. It's width corresponds to the pitch of the 'plock' sound, and the height determines how much reverb to put on the sound. Both the width and the height determine the pitch of the gong sound that the sides of the bowl make; each might determine the pitch of one of two oscillators which are ring-modulated together.

The bamboo makes a 'tock' sound when struck by a pinball and has control points for position, rotation, width, and length. The length of the piece of bamboo determines the pitch of the tock sound, and the width determines the depth, or length of the sound.

The sphere makes a 'ting' sound like a single bar from a wind chime. The control points allow you to modify the position and size of the sphere, with the size corresponding to the pitch of the chime.

Aesthetic

In my head the game looks like a piece of traditional japanese calligraphy (above is my pretty lame attempt at that look) and the scupltures are tinkly pretty things which sound like gamelan music, or John Cage's "Six Marimbas". I can imagine users creating fully fledged pieces with multiple parts and movements which sound as fascinating and wonderful as they look.

Technology

If I was to code up this game or a prototype thereof tommorrow (it could happen!), I would use the following combination of technologies:

• The core engine would be written in Python for speed of prototyping.
• The graphical component of the engine would be implemented in Pygame or Pyglet, or maybe Pycairo for the vector graphic component if it's fast and cross platform enough.
• The physics engine would be Box2d, Chipmunk, ODE, or something similarly cross-platform and Python compatible.
• The audio backend would be implemented in Pure Data. It would be launched as a subprocess and would use the '-nogui' flag and sockets/pipes to communicate with the Python based front-end. Individual elements would each have their own Pure Data abstraction, and dynamic patching would be used to create instances of each element. Incidentally, Pd is the music engine for the recently released vide game, Spore.

All these technologies can be googled for more info.

Concluding

Some good community features such as uploading and sharing sculpture compositions would be nice, and png-embedded data files could be cool as well, so that images could be dragged from a browser into the game and loaded up instantly, and users could easily share compositions by sharing screenshots. Another cool feature might be to have elements that are touching eachother on the canvas have some kind of audio interplay such as ring-modulation between the two sounds. That kind of stuff should be experimented with after the basic prototype of the game is up and running.

Huge thanks go to Simon Wittber who organised GameJam, and wrote the entire GameJam site in time for the competition. He also did the awesome procedural audio ambience for my game, and on top of that, he did the most incredibly annoying bit of making a game for me: the deployment.

Contact Agent zipfile

I didn't finish the game, so it's just one level, and all you can do is run and jump and explore. I can't even really call it an art game because I feel like that would be selling other, really awesome art games short. The vector graphics engine I wrote is massively slow because I didn't have time to optimise anything, which had the side effect of making you fall through floors and stuff on any computer that isn't massively fast. I shouldn't have multiplied all vectors by frame-elapsed time since that number gets really large on those slower computers. Oh well. Good lessons for next time!

One thing that is hard to come by is a good, free and open source vector animation program. The Inkscape website says that they are looking at introducing animation into the program some time in the future, but who knows how long that will take. I needed to make animated vector graphics for my GameJam 0808 entry, which is a vector graphics platformer, so I knocked together a quick script to do layer based animation in Inkscape. Luckily Inkscape's extensions system is quite extensible, so I was able to write a small Python script that renders each layer separately using Inkscape itself, and then uses Imagemagick's "convert" program to mash the layers together into an animated GIF. Finally, the extension automatically launches the default browser to display the result. This currently only works under GNU/Linux systems with Imagemagick installed, but I'm sure it wouldn't be too big a stretch to get it working on other operating systems.

Here is the Inkscape extension XML file. Place this in your .inkscape/extensions/ directory in a file called gifanimate.inx:

<inkscape-extension>
  <_name>GIF Animate</_name>
  <id>org.ekips.filter.GIFAnimate</id>
  <dependency type="executable" location="extensions">gifanimate.py</dependency>
  <dependency type="executable" location="extensions">inkex.py</dependency>
  <!-- <param name="what" type="string" _gui-text="What would you like to greet?">World</param> -->
  <effect>
    <object-type>all</object-type>
    <effects-menu>
       <submenu _name="Animate"/>
    </effects-menu>
  </effect>
  <script>
    <command reldir="extensions" interpreter="python">gifanimate.py</command>
  </script>
</inkscape-extension>

Here is the Python script that does all the work. Put this in the same place, and name it 'gifanimate.py'.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys, os
sys.path.append('/usr/share/inkscape/extensions')

import inkex
from simplestyle import *

class GIFAnimate(inkex.Effect):
    def __init__(self):
        inkex.Effect.__init__(self)

    def effect(self):
        infile = sys.argv[-1]

        # Get access to main SVG document element and get its dimensions.
        from xml.dom.minidom import parse, parseString
        dom = parse(infile)
        svg = dom.getElementsByTagName('svg')[0]

        layers = svg.getElementsByTagName('g')
        pngcommand = "inkscape %s -C -i '%s' -j -e /tmp/%s.png 2>&1 > /dev/null"

        layerids = []
        delays = []
        for l in layers:
            bits = l.getAttribute('inkscape:label').split("#")
            if not "ignore" in bits:
                layerids.append(l.getAttribute('id'))
                delays.append(bits[0])

        [os.system(pngcommand % (infile, id, id)) for id in layerids]
        bits = " ".join(["-delay %d /tmp/%s.png" % (int(delays[x]), layerids[x]) for x in range(len(layerids))])
        gifcmd = "convert -loop 0 " + bits + " /tmp/inkscape-anim.gif"
        os.system(gifcmd)
        import webbrowser
        webbrowser.open("file:///tmp/inkscape-anim.gif")

# Create effect instance and apply it.
effect = GIFAnimate()
effect.affect()

To use it go to the 'effects' menu and choose 'Animate > GIF Animate'. Specify frame lengths (in milliseconds) by renaming the layer to the length of time that you'd like each frame to last. Inkscape will add a hash followed by a number for each duplicate entry, but my script will ignore that.

Have fun!

This is the tenative title, and main character, from my entry into the competition:

Anyway, Simon built this cool community site in a matter of days using Pylons, which you can see at http://gamejam.org/ and then we put out the word on the internets, and now we are in the midst of it, with eleven days left to go. The turnout has been pretty superb and I am looking forward to seeing everyone's finished projects. The competition is very loose; you can use any engine you want and pretty much do any kind of game you want, as long as you use the 'significant asset' in your game. Also, it isn't really limited to Perth only and it only just started not long ago, so if you have a hankering to develop a game idea then this is the forum for you; go ahead and join the fray!

My own game is a vector graphics platformer. I think I'll probably get all the code done in time with a basic playable game, but I'm not so sure about getting it deployed onto all platforms. We'll see, I guess!

We'll almost certainly do more game jams in future months. Can't wait.

I recently bought a 'digital notepad'. It's a device that looks kind of like a clipboard, and you can clip regular paper notepads into. When you draw on the paper with a special pen, your pen strokes are digitally recorded. Later you can hook the thing up to a computer to copy the vectorised notes across and get your hand-drawings in a nice flexible vector format.

This one is made by a company called Laser here in Australia but pretty much every digital notepad on the market is made by one taiwanese company, Waltop, who sell them to other companies for rebranding. The device runs fine under Debian in both USB disk mode, and tablet mode. Here is a link to a blog post with a heap of information about the digital notepad and running it under GNU/Linux (there is lots of info in the comments too):

http://eddie.niese.net/20071129/new-digital-notepad-gadget/

Modes

The notepad operates in two distinct modes. The first mode is as a regular notepad that internally digitises everything that you write in ink while it's not connected to your computer. This is reasonably effective although I have found that very occasionally, maybe one to three times per page, the pen will miss a stroke. I think this is due to the angle I write on, or not pressing the pen down hard enough when I do a light stroke. For what I am using the notepad for it's no problem since I import the notes as SVG files and then modify them in tablet mode later. I use a small Python script by Jorik Blaas to turn the notes from the .top file format they are stored as, to svg format. You can copy the .top files from the device to your computer when it's connected via the USB cable. Click here to download the Python script (I got it from the URL listed above).

Which brings me to the other mode; tablet mode. When the notepad is connected via USB to a computer it acts like a USB disk that you can copy notes off, but it simultaneously makes the notepad behave like a primitive graphics tablet. I say primitive because it has no pressure sensitivity, and it really just emulates a mouse - as you move the pen about on the surface, the mouse cursor follows. When you press the pen down, the mouse clicks. So far this has been fine for the little sketches I've been making.

Other stuff

The box also came with a black portfolio to carry the notepad around in, a USB cable, batteries, replacement ink cartridges, a plastic tipped cartridge for tablet mode, and a bunch of Windows software that I did not use. The whole package cost me about $160(AU) plus twenty five bucks or so postage.

I am pretty excited about this device and it's been fun playing with it over the last week or so. One of the difficult things about being a solo indie games programmer is not having graphics for your games. I have always found the hand-drawn aesthetic quite endearing in video games so I might have a shot at sketching some characters and backgrounds.

I have a bunch of other ideas for applications using tablet/touchscreen, so hopefully I'll get around to coding up some of those. Exciting times!

"In the Jewish tradition the full prayer service can be performed only in a quorum of ten adult males known in Hebrew as a minyan. The main part of the service, which occurs three times daily, is the Shmona Esrei, or Eighteen Benedictions. These blessings are first recited silently by the entire congregation. Afterwards, during the morning and afternoon liturgies, they are repeated aloud by the cantor, often referred to as the Ba'al Tefillah or 'Master of Prayer'. In orthodox Judaism any male, whether layman or cleric, over the age of thirteen can lead the prayers. During the repetition of the Shmona Esrei, also called the Amidah, or 'standing prayer', the congregation answers responsively to each of the benedictions recited. In this installation each computer has been individually programmed to respond to the blessings recited by the main computer, the 'Master of Prayer', leading the afternoon Mincha service. Though the installation appears to parody the human condition of prayer by rote, on a deeper level it asks a haunting question about the inherent nature of artificial intelligence. The Jewish sages require kavannah, or 'proper intent' for prayer to be truly acceptable. To the extent that computers can be programmed to 'think', might they not be programmed to this 'proper intent' as well? In a tentative answer to that question, 'Master of Prayer' can be experienced as a high-tech, Jewish version of the Tibetan prayer-wheel or Christian rosary beads."