A New Prototype
January 16, 2013
A quick Wednesday update this week.
I’ve been feverishly working away this past week – hence the lack of our weekly ‘Friday Fun’. And I’m afraid this Friday will slip through the cracks too. So while we’re on the subject, I’m just going to leave this here for you: whale.fm. Try to match various snippets of whale songs to identify the whales you are hearing. What makes this awesome is that these are true, very-recent recordings from the wild. Researchers are using the help of people like us (who spend time on the internet, you see) to identify a bunch of recordings. My favorite part is you get to see where the whale you’re listening to was heard. Personally, I liked the Norwegian whales the best. Those in the Caribbean were a bit too laid back for me.
Ah, but on to what I did with my week.
Evolution Simulation
Last week I showed off the video of a sample from this simulation. I’m happy with where it stands at the moment. I did a bit on it this week, and still have some to do to make it useable (adding instructions and so on). But for the next week or so I’m shelving it. Why? Because I’m testing out a new prototype for a game.
Electromagnetism Game
I’d mentioned a month or so ago (can’t be buggered to look!) that I thought Electromagnetism might be next up for a game. I’m just testing things out at this point, and who knows if anything will come of it — only a small portion of prototypes see the light of day. But I figured I’d give you a glimpse in at the beauty of the game so far:
Just boxes. What the heck is going on there? Well, I wanted to show off this image to give you all a little glimpse into the development process. It is not a polished beast (like, say, most of the images I wait to show you). Most of the time I’m just working with lines and geometric shapes. But the core is in fact there.
The green and blue (surrounded by lines) are negative and positive charges, with field lines emanating from them. You are the wee grey box on the left. Right now, I’ve set it up so that the goal is to jump from platform to platform and make it across the level. Picture something like Super Meat Boy. But replace half of the gore with Electric and Magnetic fields. And make your character electrically charged. Suddenly the fields become very important for you to pay attention to.
As I said, this is very early on, but I’ve been pretty focused this week so far in bringing this project together and getting a proof-of-concept. Am I there yet? Nope, but I can say it already keeps me entertained when I play it. So something is going right…
-Andy
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