More ➜Every game is a fragment world– bordered by the rules of its logic. These boundaries may be spoken out loud (don’t step on the cracks! the floor is lava!) or may be programmed (the end of traversable ground, the rim of the map, an invisible wall that plays a bonk sound effect when you walk into […] Link
I haven’t been posting work notes while the world crumbles, but I’ve been keeping them locally. There’s been a few updates to the unnamed roguelike that are worth mentioning, the first is I’ve been experimenting with a creeping plant class, working off the idea that once the player dies the game keeps going, and plant growth would be nice. Other than that, lots of little tweaks, like refactored item and entity classes, arrows that can spread fire, fire destroying things, and I experimented with multiple player instances, which just worked on the first try.
More ➜Kai Krause [today: kai.sub.blue]was born 1957 in Dortmund. He came to California in 1976 with two friends. He worked as a musician for Disney Sound Effects; the sound track for “Star Trek: The Movie” was created on his synthesizers*. […] Link
While it’s not as attractive or ‘in-world’ as a mazelike tilemap representation would be, I’ve made an auto minimap for grotto using D3. D3 is a library to procedurally draw SVG in a browser, and it’s commonly used for interactive data visualizations. I used it here because it has the ability to create force directed node maps. This means nodes are repelled from one another in a game-physics like simulation, so rather than needing to figure out how to place them on the screen, they simply spread out to positions where they no longer overlap. Here’s what it looks like in a room with a lot of sibling nodes:
New Studio space! I just moved some things into a workspace at The Museum of Human Achievement.
Now I am deciding what to work on next. I think there was potential in the installation I did for my graduate thesis show, but it was missing some important pieces to be effective. The first think it’s missing is a legible mini-map. Navigating a maze that is a tree structure is incredibly frustrating. It’s maybe the worst possible level design. people get trapped in branches too easily looking for the one door back up. I’m experimenting with maps in the web game using the api, but it’s very difficult, as I’ve said before, to automatically lay these maps out. You really need a force-directed nodemap, which clashes stylistically with the patterned-tiles-on-a-grid style. I’m playing now with some nodemaps using D3, and I’m going to functionally solve the problem first and then deal with the aesthetics.
