I decided to improve upon my existing idea for a game based around ants but decided to make some significant improvements

Graphics

• Increase canvas size
• Increase player size
• Player ant having color band around neck to differentiate it from remaining ants
• Player image to be replaced by .mov of ant movement which will only play when player is moving

Gameplay

• Movement to change to keyboard with Up -> moveforward. Right -> rotate clockwise, Left->Rotate anticlockwise
• Level 1 -> go find food as fast as possible 
• Level 2 -> Find the quickest and simplest way back to your colony to get the most number of ants to follow you
• The number of ants that follow your path are proportional to the time you took to find food. Less time = better path = more food.
• Reusable gameplay
• Movable objects

Basically…

You start the game as an ant that is part of a colony.
Your colony needs food (depending on how good/bad the previous person who played the game was)
You have been asked to go forage for food. The quicker you take to find and return with food, the more ants are going to follow your path and bring back the food and therefore the sooner your colony’s needs are met.
there are objects on the map. Some you need to avoid, Some you can pick up and move.
The map you are playing is what the previous person has left behind for you.

For a long time now, I’ve been sitting on a game idea revolving around ant colonies based of Swarm Theory. An individual ant by itself is not all that smart. A colony of collective intelligence of the ants however, are incredibly smart. They are able to assess the shortest route to food, defend their colony and do a bunch of different tasks, not through great leadership, but rather self-organization.

Now I know a server based game that can incorporate a single player into the principles of self-organization and be fun is a hardly something I can do for a mid term project or for that matter even a final project for a first semester subject. Nonetheless, this is a project that I would like to finish during my time at ITP.

I’ve started on getting the game to function on a basic level as player vs computer on a single machine by developing some very very very very basic aspects of movements and oversimplified gather and follow. Need to get on to loop detection to really complete level2.

Ideally I’d like to get those to work as an asynchronous game on a local machine at least before I even touch a server. I still need to work out a lot of gameplay aspects, scoring, objectives and the nitty gritty without losing sight of the greater rhetoric.

This was a test of gameplay for our initial idea for the media controller project. Two Players on either sides would be able to move wooden paddles of different shapes to deflect a projection of a ball on a table. To test out game mechanics, I built this in processing. Watching my self play it by myself and enjoy it made me think it would be a great game for ‘foreveralone’ folks. post to reddit imminent?

Trying to recreate space invaders through processing.
Right now, I’m having a bit of difficulty trying to get the aliens that get hit to stop appearing after they have been destroyed.

Click here to view

Working Bona Kim on a super cool disco snowman
based on her drawing

Step 1: Snowing
At first I was a bit unsure how I would do the snow. Realistic with a bit of wind moving diagonally or, just falling down equally. I decided it would be easier with some nested loops to generate alternate rows of snow moving downwards. Finally to make it look “magical”, I decided to put random alpha on each snowflake as it is redrawn to appear like it is moving. So it’s bit like glittery snow?

anyhoo, Bona waved her magic wand and VOILA!

CUE THE MUSIC.

At first I had so many great ideas for artwork with just primitive shapes. I was going to create a champagne bottle composed of circles of various sizes (“Bubbly Bubbly”).

Half way through I lost interest after, first writing numerous many ellipse instructions without a clear idea of exactly how my champagne bottle was going to look, and later just getting plain bored with drawing circles in photoshop over an image of billecart-salmon and making a list of coordinates and width. Blerrghhhhhhh

So instead, I decided to do something that would trip me out a bit more instead.

Inspired By:

and then… the word inspirations got me thinking…

One of the prettiest, simplest and inspiring works of art for me is Piet Mondrian’s Composition.
Fun and not at all hard. YAY!