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This post should have been written in September, but laziness kept me. The video you see above I only got around to finishing last night. Depicted in the video is an art installation for Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda’s freshly opened art and technology space. I undertook programming duties in the project which I was invited to by Sebastián Skoknic and Francisco Fuentes.

The work uses an ordinary webcam to detect user movement, which causes stuff to happen on the screen under five distinct modes that the user can switch between via a menu that’s also motion-activated, located on the far right side of the physical space. This menu was poorly conceived, and causes plenty of user confusion due to how easy it is to obstruct with the body, which would cause random buttons being constantly activated. There are plans to scrap it in favor of a physical interface located on the ground.

An interesting feature is that it silently captures images as seen by the camera every thirty minutes. These might get collated later on and used for a video depicting users interacting with the installation over the months in sped-up form.

If you’d like to give this a try but can’t attend the actual physical space, there’s also a web version that can be used with your computer’s webcam. Go to the site of the exhibit and click the last button in that horizontal bar, the one that says ‘¡Muévete!’ Then, click on ‘Juega!’

A game of logic exploring gesture-based input. Saying more would probably mean to spoil it.

Play Ascension (Flash)

Also read: an important note.

Another arbitrary span of time, another game. I can’t really explain much about this one.

Play Intervalo… (Flash)

(It was about time I posted this.)

Perhaps you remember a Ludum Dare entry I called Climbrunner—well, this game is an evolution of that idea. Here, you run around a tricky series of screens, up the walls and ceilings, only with the ability to jump to avoid the obstacles that get in your way. There’s no dying, just lots of cursing over missed jumps and having to do it all over again. It’s a short game, but if you think it was fun once you first finish it, there’s still a second path you can try.

All you need to know to play it is that you jump with the spacebar.

Play Runnerby (Flash)

It’s a single player game, but is intended (not to a very interesting result) to be played together with other people, passing the controller around. This is why the level design has lots of ‘sticky’ places: parts that keep you in a loop until you decide to jump out, so you can safely hand over the controls. It is also how I rationalized the frustration aspect, reminding of a time in which, as a kid, I played video games with friends or my cousins, and we would take turns playing/wincing at the ‘obvious’ mistakes the others were making as they played.

I didn’t really take it where I wanted it to go, as my ambition clashed with my lazy attitude about creating the content. I submitted it to Gamma IV (despite it not fitting into the 5-minutes-per-session rule) with no positive result, and then tried Indiecade just because I really wanted it to find its way to a large event, again to no success. What it was supposed to be was a much larger world, with each screen offering challenges to reach each of the exits (at least two per screen). The reward for the challenges would not be a destination (a goal), but exploration itself: discovering what lies further into the game world. Since this was intended for an event with a massive attendance, I wanted the world to feel different depending on your whereabouts; then, whenever you glanced at the screen where the game was being played continuously for the duration of the event, you’d see someplace new. The actual finished game is really just an imperfect compromise, an abortion of these ambitions, so I’m not surprised it didn’t do well.

Credits

• Uses Adam Saltsman’s Flixel.
• Sounds by ltibbits, RealRhodesSounds, and teleport8.
• Some implemented ideas as suggested by Noyb.
• Testers: Sigal, Javi, Javy, Ilan, Mariposa, Stephen Lavelle, Terry Cavanagh, Bennett Foddy, Zaphos, Greg Wohlwend, Jasper Byrne.
• Texts quoted from Miss Mulock’s Tom Thumb.

In the second hour of yesterday’s KOTM I made this Flash drawing thing.

Give it a try

This month I made a kind of klik that took advantage of the foundations laid out in Wirewalk, Prosopamnesia, and other unreleased experiments also dealing with image searches. This made it so easy to make, that I achieved my initial concept within the first hour. This first idea involved no interactions, so I used the following hour (of two that the monthly event lasts) to add that layer of interactivity.

Deconstructivism (Flash)

You may leave it untouched and it will ‘play itself’. Or you may click and flick on the image displayed to alter it manually. If it takes too long to load, or if you want a new picture, refresh the page.

After Wirewalk, I felt inspired to do more work using images acquired through web searches. Yes, I failed to mention it when I released that one, but the images are obtained at run-time through Google Images. I’m rather proud of this particular result:

Prosopamnesia (Flash)

It was made for The Games Collective negative capability pageant. For sound, I used the port of DrPetter’s sfxr to AS3, by Thomas Vian. Also used the Google API AS3 library by Joris Timmerman, as for Wirewalk.

I’ve made a thing for an event that Stephen Lavelle describes as a ‘pageant’ —a competition sans the competitive aspect—, with the theme ‘bricolage’. (I made a promotional picture for the event, too.)

The thing I made is called Wirewalk. It’s something that, I feel, is best not to describe. Just try it and see if you like it—shouldn’t take you over a couple of minutes.

Wirewalk (Flash)

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to participate in this weekend’s Ludum Dare, as it had been too long since I last made (and released) a game. This time I didn’t make a fancy timelapse video or anything like, but I did spend some time on Friday learning to use the beautiful Flixel, and then the weekend bending it to my nonstandard needs. The result is a game, unlike last time, though not exactly what I set out to do. Still, it’s playable. And it fits the ‘exploration’ theme.

I made this animated GIF over a year ago, thinking of an idea for a game I envisioned for the Game Boy Advance. This game was to be a bichrome, Knytt–inspired platformer. I decided to reuse the core of this idea: that is, the running on walls and ceilings, and a tad more. It was simplified to the essence, though: the little guy won’t stop running, so all you can do is jump in order to steer him where you want to go. It feels a bit like controlling a jumping, sticky train.

Play Climbrunner (Flash)

This time around I didn’t neglect to provide the source code.

I’ve archived the older one (in Spanish) for posterity.