"5 Buttons" - Real Life Experimental Gameplay

So I was browsing Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently, when I stumbled across a post about the new Experimental Gameplay contest. This seemed odd, until I read on and realised that this month's contest is a very exciting thing indeed. I'm a big fan of EGP anyway, and have produced a couple of hastily thrown-together games in the past. This one however takes things to a whole new level:

This month we’re partnering with 02L >  Outside Standing Level to bring you the 5 Buttons Competition. Submit your game between now and January 31st, 11:59 PST to have the opportunity to have your game displayed at the Stattbad Gallery in beautiful Berlin, Germany.

Unlike previous competitions, however, there is a bit of a twist: games will run on 02L > Outside Standing Level’s Unita Zero platform, an audio/visual playground made up of 5 pressure pads hooked up to a projector and audio system.

Exciting, eh? Of course, €1200 is a lovely incentive, but more realistically this is a great opportunity for EGP-ers to get our games played on a big canvas. A big canvas in a swimming pool. Hooked up to a sound system. In an art gallery in Germany. What's not to love? Even though I'm busier than I've ever been, this is far, far too exciting a prospect to pass up.

The EGP themes are usually pretty broad, and often this is the factor that holds me back: a completely blank slate is often quite daunting, and I usually have trouble settling on one idea. However, this contest has a slightly more defined ruleset and conditions, which I think/hope will mean that I can be a little more focussed in my approach.

There's a few technical requirements to deal with, but the requirements that affect the game design are:
- All input (from menus to gameplay) must come from pressing the number keys 1-5, that will be mapped to big pressure pads on the floor of the exhibition
- The pressure pads have up and down states, so we can tell when people are both standing on them, or getting off them
- The audio should be prominent, as it'll be hooked up to a monster audio rig in a 'club setting'
- The buttons will be spaced out in such a way that one user could activate two or possibly three of the pads at a time (this is to be confirmed)

The setting of the project has made me mentally rule out single player games. In this kind of environment the whole point I think is to engage groups of people, be that spectators or players. Going onward from that decision it's then down to considering how the group of players interact: are they playing against each other, or as a team? Again, my gut reaction given the setting would be to lean towards collaborative play. I'm certainly not ruling anything out at this stage, but my focus in getting ideas down will definitely be more along the lines of bringing users together into one gameplay experience; I love the idea of teams working together, and what's more it's a really novel way to explore multiplayer gaming in a pretty unique setting.

Needless to say, I'm excited. Expect more soon on this!

vvvv and projection mapping @ madlab

Little bit late in posting this (busy busy), but: a couple of weekends ago I was lucky enough to grab a spot on an amazing projection mapping course at Madlab, run by Elliot Woods. I've been hankering after doing more large-scale work, especially after the Tate projection I did a while ago, so when I saw this course come up I jumped at the chance.

The software that handles everything is called vvvv, and it basically looks like this (yep, no interface):

I'd never even heard of it until the course, but it's a very clever piece of software, and I get the feeling that I've barely even begun to scratch the surface of it. The interface is massively minimal, very industrial and clean. You create programs ('patches') visually, by dropping in and connecting up blocks. It's almost closer to electronics than programming in many ways, it took quite a bit of mental adjustment for me to get into the habit of doing things without code. Of course, you can also dig into it and write code too, but for our purposes we didn't need to. The big, big difference that screwed with my brain a little was that vvvv doesn't compile into anything: you just keep working on your patch and keep an eye on it as you go. This was a pretty big shift in approach for me, but actually for something like projection mapping where you're working with real objects, seeing things 'live' is incredibly useful.

The first day was largely spent going over the software ins and outs: it was a long and pretty knackering day but very rewarding to get it all working. It's rare these days where I feel like I'm learning something totally and utterly new: I've never used anything like vvvv before, so getting even the most rudimentary patch working, and actually understanding it all, was very satisfying.

Day two was when the action happened, we broke out the projectors! We started small, using a linemapping patch to pick out objects. The group I was in ended up pointing the projection at the ceiling and mapping onto the beams, which was pretty neat:

We then moved onto quad mapping, which is really powerful. This involves matching a geometric shape to the real object, which can then be treated as a 'screen' within the projection. We mapped onto stacks of boxes, and applied images and video all over the place. It's a really clever technique, it's such a simple idea but looks amazing.

We spent the rest of the day generally exploring the software and projectors, it was great to watch each group go in slightly different directions with it all. vvvv lends itself to experimentation really well: the barrier for entry with this kind of software is so low, just connect stuff and see what happens! Being up and running so fast with no prior knowledge is just not possible with code.

At the end of the second day, Elliot went into a demo of much more complex 3D mapping, defining points in 3D space and using that to map with. If I'm honest, I didn't take much of this in at the time: I was pretty frazzled by this point! I'm sure once I sit down with it I'll figure it out.

So anyway, yes: amazing weekend. I really feel like I've learned a proper, brand-new skill. And I'm not done yet! By happy coincidence, I'm already working on a projection piece at work, and after doing this course I've switched it up a little and we'll be projection mapping onto objects instead of a flat surface. I've already started test mapping stuff in the studio, hopefully I'll be going a lot more crazy with this in the coming weeks:

More on this to come, definitely!

Tate projection installation: 3,500 messages later!

The projection installation I created for the Tate Liverpool has been live for a while now, and yesterday I was sent a dump of all the data that's been entered into it so far.

It makes for really interesting reading: I learned that for the most part my swear filter worked well, apart from a few (admittedly creative) exceptions. I also learned that people really tend to write a lot of crap into public installations.... I was obviously expecting a few posts to be hidden, but the percentage that the staff had to manually disable was far far higher than I'd ever have estimated. It was great to see however that some people seemed to take the time to write genuinely nice comments, not just about the exhibition but about the Tate and the staff, and even one or two about the projection itself, which was nice. :)

There were a few common themes throughout: unsurprisingly a lot of schoolkids tended to write things like "Dave Smith was here", and there were a lot of attempts at getting profanity or offensive content through. Luckily the staff were really on top of things and shut that stuff down pretty fast. Something I did find interesting however was the amount of "vote labour" posts: either there was one committed chap continually posting, or a few people had the same idea. Strange. Some of the comments were just completely unrelated in every way, I think it must be the anonymity coupled with the fact that the comments are going to be six feet wide that incites people into writing absolute crap.

Anyway, the full list can be viewed here. Below is a selection of the best ones I've found (for various reasons!)

• "Could somebody please give me directions to the art?"
• "I love Nancy Allen...will you marry me?"
• "SHE SAID YES!!! WAAHEEEEEEEEY"
• "It looks very hard growing up,and i dont want to grow up."
• "I felt the work conveyed the struggle between youth and adulthood beautifully. It reflected how i feel about the sudden jump we go through as people into world of responsibilities."
• "i like the sculpture on the floor. it makes me think of great things. Leo, aged 4."
• "FRIDAY FRIDAY GOTTA GET DOWN ON FRIDAY"
• "HAPPENED TO WALK PAST WITH A BAG OF SWEETS AND THOUGHT 'ART' I WILL GO AND HAVE A LOOK AT THAT BECAUSE IT IS RAINING"
• "rowan thinks this is beautiful. Age 5."
• "I enjoyed the way the pieces could be understood and interpreted differently by the different age groups, it made the exhibition almost personal. Amy-age 26"
• "All in all good fun and interesting, thanks for a great day, BOOBIES"
• "hi i am writing on a wall!"
• "art confuses and confounds me! keep it simple!!!"
• "Interesting artwork included here, I'm not sure if I like it or not. The artwork itself is slightly too wacky, however, the reasons for the art make sense. 7/10"
• "It leaves more questions unanswered than answers questions"
• "pretentious"
• "In my country, we have a saying: put computers in the hands of fools and you will experience folly"
• "What a great way of capturing people's views of the exhibitions in a way that in itself, is art."

For science! DIYBIO #2 @ MadLab

This week saw the second meeting of the Manchester branch (chapter?) of DIYBio. I attended the first meeting purely to have a look-see and take a few photos for Madlab, and found it so interesting that I've decided to get stuck right in.

As discussed in the first meeting, we're kicking things off with a relatively modest project, the Manchester Microbe map. I see this project as a kickstarter rather than a true maiden project, but it's definitely a solid foundation to build on for the group, and will not only allow us to see who can offer what to the group, but will also let us begin to think about where DIYBio Manchester is heading in terms of future projects.

The discussion throughout was great this time around, with the focus switched more to the group members as opposed to last month's more structured introductory talk, and it was awesome to see people from all sorts of backgrounds getting stuck in and chucking ideas around. Like I mentioned last time, I was really concerned that I'd be in a minority of creatives compared to scientists, but this isn't the case at all: there's a great mix of people involved.

Part of the session was quite a hands-on part, explaining how to take microbial samples from objects accurately. I'm sure that for the biologists in the room this part was everyday run-of-the-mill stuff, but for someone like me who has no experience with any of this, it was quite interesting to get my hands dirty (literally). We took samples of our hand-prints, and I also managed to take a good sample of the zoom lens on my camera: I'm not sure I want to see what will grow from four years of accumulated gigs and festivals, but it's for science I suppose. :)

The second half of the evening was a round-table discussion into the specifics of the Microbe Map project, and it was great to see that most people agreed on most bits of the plan (at least, I think they did). There was some interesting discussion on the ethics involved in anything we do, which I found surprising: even though all we're going to be doing is swabbing things, full permissions need to be granted so that our bases are covered. We decided that some sort of blanket authorisation would work best, so for example someone at the council could give us the OK, or perhaps someone involved in the transport network could give us a general OK to go ahead. I think that this is something that's still being worked out, but by the sounds of it this consideration is certainly going to affect how the project turns out.

In terms of specifics, the plan will be to try and sample Manchester in the same very specific timeframe, rather than say, over a week or so. This will allow us (as Martyn Amos put it) to take a biological 'snapshot' of Manchester, which means in turn that we'll have a slightly more focused set of results. We've agreed on May 4th to get together at Madlab, run out and sample whatever it is we're sampling, and return them back to Madlab at the same time. I'm still not 100% sure I can make it due to it being my anniversary, but there's plenty of people involved so we should get a good range of samples hopefully.

Even at this early stage I'm already considering the end results, in terms of visualising whatever data we come up with. On the night I really tried to push for people taking photographs in addition to collecting data about each sample, which will be really helpful. I have no idea where I'd want to take this visually yet, I'm currently investigating if there are any others in the group that would like to collaborate on this end of things, and of course we're waiting on specifics of the study to be announced. Once I get more info and have a think, I'll probably outline my plans in another post (incidentally, if anyone's reading this who's at the more creative end of the spectrum, please drop me an email or catch me at the next meet-up!)

So yes, game on. We're starting small, but hopefully this little taster will grow into something amazing. For science!

For more up-to-date discussion there's a Google group for DIYBio_MCR, a dedicated twitter feed, the Madlab website, and of course this humble blog. :)

Tate Installation - What I Learned

The installation project that I was working on for the Tate Liverpool is finally finished and installed, and has been running for a few days. It turned out really nicely, although the process was a lot different to my usual kind of project. While I'm happy with the final result, there's a lot I'd do differently if I tried to tackle something like this again (and hopefully I will). Here's what I learned:

Choose your technology wisely.
I made the projector in Flash, as a dual-screen AIR application. The primary screen is the user-facing input part, where people write their comments. This screen also serves as the admin screen if a password is entered into the comment area. The second 'screen' is actually the projection itself. I used this handy class to make life easier, but it was still a bit of a pain making sure that focus was doing what I wanted. I'm also really concerned that the Flash player might be prone to crapping the bed when it's been left running for a few days, it's not something I've got much experience with.Only time will tell if it stays stable, it's been a few days and I've not heard anything. In hindsight, I kind of wish I'd gone with my initial plan to use Processing, but I ended up taking the comfortable option and going with the technology I knew best, despite the advantages that Processing would have given me. Ah well.

Testing an installation project is hard.
Working on a regular monitor for a piece that's eventually going to be a few meters wide is a total nightmare. I spent days working with font sizes that looked completely natural on-screen, but looked totally different when we projected. About halfway through the build we rigged up a McGyver-style setup in the studio (see below) and managed to approximate a projection at the right size, and immediately realised that the fonts were still miniscule. Whoops. Next time around, I'm going to try and run the maths on it first: if the client wants a certain text size (in inches for example) then I need to sit down beforehand and figure out what size to set my assets at. It would still need testing, but my approach on this one wasn't even an educated guess and really created a lot of extra work.

Never underestimate people's creativity when it comes to profanity.
Filtering swearwords was the biggest concern I had for the entire build. In the past I'd done some very basic filtering, but only for things like websites and apps. It doesn't really do much damage if someone decides to fill my forms with swearwords. However, if someone sneaks a few creatively-formatted cuss words through at a crowded Tate exhibition, it's potentially a huge deal. I ended up going for a three-tiered approach that seems to have a worked alright. I won't go into the technical specifics (that's a whole post on it's own) but it essentially checks input against a massive list, then searches for the more common words within words, including common letter/number substitutions. I tested what I thought was a solid system very early on, mainly through my Facebook friends, and within a few minutes realised that people are immensely clever at subverting filters and ruining my day. Hilarious as it was, the testing proved invaluable, and meant that I came up with what I'd like to think is a pretty robust system. I've not had an angry call from the Tate yet, so that's reassuring.

Letting staff edit content without the use of a mouse, is a pain.
The screen has a password-controlled admin screen that allows the staff at the exhibition to quickly access the user comments, in date/time order, and very quickly disable any offensive or unsuitable comments. This was an important feature: I was pretty confident in my profanity filtering, but of course there's a lot you can do without swearing. My big issue was the lack of a mouse, so I had to handle screen-to-screen focusing cleverly to make sure the user couldn't get out of place or lock themseleves out of the screen. Turned out really well though.

Block that keyboard.
In addition to filtering out swearwords, I needed to make sure that nobody was going to kill the presentation or alt-tab out of it, or whatever. This was absolutely mission-critical, and should really have been the very very first thing I sorted out, but of course I ended up getting stuck into the visuals and leaving it til last. Mistaaaake! Luckily, I found this little app that allowed us to quickly disable a lot of the keys. Again, if I'd done this in Processing I could have done this myself as part of the app, which would have been a much more streamlined solution than relying on a second external app to handle key blocking. Not to worry though.

Overall I'm very happy with how it went from a technical perspective. There was nothing that went particularly 'wrong' with it, I just think that with a little more planning in advance I could have saved myself time, and made life easier.

We did end up slightly simplifying it visually, just so we knew it would work. Again, this wasn't a mistake as such, I just kind of wished I'd done a bit more testing to see what I could have gotten away with. I also think this would have been a great learning experience had I picked Processing over Flash, but of course that comes with the risk of things not going as smoothly as it did due to be me using an environment I'm familar with. Perhaps there's better projects to cut my teeth on than ones that are going to be projecting in front of hundreds of people. Hmm.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the experience overall, and will definitely jump at the chance to do something like this again. If you're in Liverpool in the next two months, go check it out.

'Enter the amateur!' - DIYbio @ Madlab

Photo: madlabuk

On Wednesday night I managed to get down to the first Manchester DIYbio event at Madlab. It was the kind of event I wouldn't usually have been instinctively drawn to, but after Lia at Madlab suggested I check it out and get my thoughts down I decided to get in there and see what the project was about. I was initially there on a whim and wasn't expecting to be hugely involved, but I came out of it with every intention of getting stuck into the project first-hand.

DIYBio "is an organization dedicated to making biology an accessible pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists and biological engineers who value openness and safety". The movement covers a wealth of community-driven projects all over the world, spanning a wide range of disciplines, with a focus on bringing biology out of the lab and into the hands of people who wouldn't ordinarily have access to these fields.

Going into the event I was a little apprehensive that I'd be in a minority of techies in a large group of terribly knowledgeable biologist types. It was quite nice to find out that actually the group was comprised of more tech folks than scientists, and after chatting to a few people it quickly became clear there is a great range of practitioners involved, both from Team Digital and Team Science. :)

The overall plan is that any future project ideas will be open to the group for discussion and planning, but as a introductory project the organisers have come up with The Manchester Microbe Map: an investigation into the microbes on ATM machines all over the city. I think this is a great starting point: it's an interesting idea that will allow the group to establish who can do what, both in terms of who's willing get out there and get stuff done, and also who can bring particular skills to the table. My interest with this project is definitely the data visualisation end of things: once we have our data, what can we do with it digitally? I love the idea of getting this stuff mapped out and visualising things like physical factors, proximity to certain places of interest, time of day etc: there's a lot of factors we might consider, and it might even turn out we discover more factors once we get stuck into the data. The final piece is being shown (I think) at FutureEverything, so it would be great to be involved from the outset. Hopefully there'll be some data vis ninjas involved that I can learn from.

As part of the Microbe Map project involves swabbing for samples, we also ran through a highly entertaining demo on DNA extraction "tiki-style", using pineapple juice, washing up liquid, salt, and a sample of saliva. Bonus points to those who drank the shot afterwards ("in the name of science!"), I wasn't remotely man enough to try it.

DIYBio MCR looks like it could turn out to be hugely interesting anyway, there's a ton of talented people involved, and a massive scope to do, well, anything. Once again, the Madlab guys have allowed this to happen in a really great environment, and I couldn't be happier that Manchester is involved in another awesome project like this. The DIYBio meetups are once a month, hopefully this initial project will kickstart something brilliant. Looking forward to the next one!

Beginner's Arduino @ Madlab

Yesterday I was lucky enough to attend an introductory Arduino course at Madlab in Manchester. I've been wanting to get into this stuff for a while now, so when the course came up I jumped at the chance to get stuck in.

Madlab itself is an awesome space, somehow I managed to completely pass it by and not attend anything there until yesterday. What they're doing is a really good thing: creating a proper grass-roots creative space for the whole city to use. Next time they need volunteers for things (I've seen them put a few calls out in the past), I'll definitely be getting stuck into helping them out, it's a great place run by great folks. The Omniversity programme reflects this too, offering a really diverse range of training at an amazing price: the Arduino course was £120 for a whole day's training, and I came out with an Uno board and a loads of bits. Bargain.

Anyway, Arduino is an open-source hardware platform that lends itself really well to experimentation and prototyping. It's cheap, really easy to get into, and allows programmers to screw around with electronics pretty quickly without requiring a shitload of prior knowledge. It seems like a logical progression for me: I know Flash inside out, and I do a little Processing, I love to experiment, and I'm too old for Lego. The Arduino platform fits my requirements pretty much perfectly then.

Within a few minutes we'd connected the boards via USB and got them up and running. The Arduino language is very similar to Processing, in fact the environment is almost identical. The main difference to Processing is the fact that once you've finished writing your code in Arduino, you can hit 'upload' and send everything to the physical board. The whole process was far easier than I was expecting, and the satisfaction of seeing your code controlling physical components for the first time is absolutely immense. Even just wiring up a couple of LED's and a potentiometer and making it work properly gave me a real sense of 'I made this! With my hands!'. We kept connected via USB for these lessons, but once the code is uploaded to the chip's memory you can hook up a 9v battery or even an AC adaptor. Very flexible.

The physical components themselves are wired to a breadboard, which is none-permanent (i.e. not soldered in). This means you can screw around with things all day and re-use everything. Of course, if you wanted to make something permanent you could easily transfer your hardware to a smaller Arduino and solder it all in, no problem. At the moment my interest is in experimentation, so the Uno fits the bill great.

Once we'd gotten the basics down, everything else followed really quickly. The group was quite small, and we were all kind of the same level, so things moved pretty swiftly. The course materials were great too, we got printed versions of all the board layouts, along with all the stuff digitally too. The projects themselves were great, each one introduced a new idea or concept or component, but in a way that really wanted you to keep messing around and pushing it further. The highlight for me was getting wiring up a potentiometer and a light sensor to act as a makeshift theremin, incredibly geeky but very cool.

So, next steps? I ordered a basic starter kit from Oomlout that has more stuff to play around with, and my priority objective is to get my hardware talking to Flash, probably using something like AS3glue. Once that's down, the possibilities are absolutely endless: I love the idea of controlling my Flash games with accelerometers and light sensors and generally going nuts with the tech.

Overall it was a great day. If you're even remotely interested in this stuff, you have got to check Arduino out. I feel like this is definitely just the beginning of some serious nerd-fu.

Accurate Geolocation in Away3D

I built a globe in Away3D recently, and needed to mark on a few countries. It didn't have to be that accurate, but I figured that if I'm going to spend time putting points on it, they might as well be spot-on.

It was actually pretty straightforward to do, and turned out really nicely:

This example works using manually typed latitude and longitude, but it would be pretty simple to hook up an API that would let us edit the points, Google Maps might even do it.

Once we've got our latitude and longitude, the only other thing we need is an accurate map. I made this texture in Photoshop, but ensured that the map I worked off was designed to be wrapped around a globe. When it's laid flat, it actually looks very weird and warped (Antarctica looks massive, for example), but this is to allow for it 'pinching' at the top and bottom when the texture is applied. Obviously the map needs to be set exactly right in terms of placement too, I could tell mine was correct because the UK (i.e. the GMT timezone) was in the exact center:

Each country is then added to an array. I got these manually online, so they're far more accurate than I really need them, but it doesn't really make any difference:

locations.push(["Turkey", 38.963745, 35.243322]);

Once we have the locations, there's some scary-looking math that will convert the latitude and longitude into radians, in three dimensions. Initially I thought that maybe it was just three straightforward trig calculations, but it's actually a little more involved:

var phi:Number = (90 - locations[i][1]) * Math.PI/180;

var theta:Number = (locations[i][2] + 180) * Math.PI/180;

marker.x = (earthRadius + 15) * Math.sin(phi) * Math.cos(theta); 

marker.z = (earthRadius + 15) * Math.sin(phi) * Math.sin(theta);

marker.y = (earthRadius + 15) * Math.cos(phi);
           
(This is a bit of a step up from 2D trigonometry, and I definitely want to get my head around it.)

Anyway, that's the markers placed correctly in 3D space, but we still need them to point 'inwards', towards the center of the globe. We could work this out in the same sort of way as the placement calculation, but Away3D makes it a bit easier by letting us tell each marker to 'look' (orient) itself towards a given point. This is a simple example, so everything orients itself to the center of the space, at 0,0,0:

marker.lookAt(new Number3D(0, 0, 0));

marker.pitch(90);

And that's it, accurate markers on an Away3D globe.

EDIT: Had a couple of people asking for the source, so here's a really basic version to check out. The texture is a free one that I downloaded here.

geolocation.zip [3.2mb]

My first installation, argh!

I've recently been asked to help build an interactive projecting installation for a museum in the UK (can't say much more about it for now, but it's a well-known art museum in Liverpool, you work it out!).

The brief is to come up with a way of letting users comment on the exhibition interactively, and to display that information to other visitors in an interesting way. The plan is to have one machine dedicated to user input (hopefully a touch-screen), and then another machine hooked up to a projector in the venue that will have an animating display showing loads of live data, that contantly checks through user's comments and displays them nicely. I'll be using AIR for both parts, and some sort of database solution to store the info (I might even grab tweets from a dedicated Twitter feed too, if there's enough interest).

This is a really nice example of what I'm seeing in my head, although this one is A) webcam enabled, and B) completely bloody amazing. Still:

Nike NO MORE TALK from seeper on Vimeo.

It's an interesting challenge anyway, and something I've got no experience in doing really. I'm quite excited to be involved though, but it means I'm going to have to really think hard about how I go about doing it. My work is usually online, or given to reps, or installed on computers. Having my work displayed in public for a few weeks where large numbers of people are going to screw with it presents it's own set of issues for me. Like these:

Potential Issue #1: Idiots. 
Idiots love to break lovely things like the thing I want to make. By this, I mean typing "cock" instead of a name, or sneakily quitting the app, or somehow trying to break it, whatever. I need to bear in mind that while writing "cock" as a username isn't the end of the world on a website, projecting it onto the wall at a busy art exhibition might be slightly more of an issue. I think that the museum setting means that this sort of sabotage is probably slightly less likely to occur than say, if it was in the middle of a street, but regardless: this thing needs to be completely twat-proof. My data will probably be stored remotely (a really simple mySQL type deal), which means that I could give staff at the museum the power to delete any offensive comments that slip through the net.

Potential Issue #2: Technology.
The program will be running for long stretches of time, which means that I really need to know that if things go wrong, I've got some sort of backup. My plan is to have the two machines hooked up to a network, but at the moment I think it'll be wirelessly. That means that if the wireless drops out for some reason, I need to know my program won't shit the bed and break completely. I think I'm going to have rolling checks at regular intervals that will grab any new comments from the database, and copy them to a local source which will then be used to power the projection content. This means that I can do a check for connection before each update attempt, and if none is found then it's not the end of the world and the program will keep running.

Potential Issue #3: Setting.
This is the first piece of work I've ever done that is location-dependent. How and where it's installed, and on what kit, is going to have a pretty huge effect on the end product. This means that I need to get in there with a camera and figure out where and how I'm deploying it, before I do anything else. There's even been talk of projecting onto a none-flat surface (maybe having raised sections to project individual quotes on to), which would be great, but is a lot more involved. We'll see what happens with that though.

So yes, I'm very excited, and can't wait to get stuck into tackling this thing. Once I get a proper working prototype down I'll probably update again with how it's going.

This should either be a really positive learning experience for me, or a massive and spectacular failure. Luckily, I'm an optimist prime. :)

EGP entry for November: SolarCar

Very quick and dirty one, this!

I spent five hours (ish) making a quick interactive concept for the Experimental Gameplay Project theme "Night and Day".

I came up with a little driving game where your solar-powered car slowly runs out of juice unless you drive into the light. The objective is to collect coins that increase in points value if the player combos together a longer string of coins in between charges. This creates a bit of a risk/reward thing as the player who plays it safe doesn't score big points.

It's very rough around the edges, but I think the concept works pretty well. I'd love to turn it into something more substantial at some point, perhaps as a proper racer rather than a mindless collecting exercise. It would be pretty cool to sabotage your opponents light sources to get ahead in the race, or maybe each player could be light or dark, and have to turn light sources on and off to gain an advantage.

Not bad for a few hour's work anyway, here it is: SolarCar.