Art
DINO Game Jam
This weekend DINO Interactive Studios hosted a game jam and interactive project creation session at the Sprout space in Somerville that spanned both Saturday and Sunday. Our jam lasted 27 hours total and had 12 participants and teams either creating new games from scratch or reworking current games and adding new features.
We had a pretty lively crowd with luckily enough string cheese and Oreos to go around. There was some LOLing with Pong on an Arduino made by Jimmie Rodgers.
An awesome Tic-Tac-Toe game made out of wood by Schuyler Towne that will have locks to pick in each turn in order to place an X or O on the board.
I made Giant Snail Take Over- a papercraft game from a Mountain Dew box and some animals and town scenes I found online as well as some motorized props. The gameplay was recorded into a stop-motion papercraft spaghetti western movie on Youtube.
Darius Kazemi reworked his turn-based strategy game and posted a movie to Youtube.
Michael Carriere and K. Adam White collaborated on a game affectionately called RAAJOCBDFOTLSOTS made in Flixel, in which you run around and jump on cars but try not to fall off the left side of the screen!
Darren Torpey demoed an early-stage game he is going to bring into Facebook to log emotions and experiences and David Ludwig demoed his Ball Game, a puzzle based game made for the iPhone that uses the accelerometer feature for a ball to reach it’s target as well as his Falling Stuff screensaver he made in Box2D.
Last but not least Fahreddın Basegmez, one of the makers of Mekanimo- a free 2D physics simulator, and his son Dennis created Cows In Space.
All in all a very productive weekend!
Giant Snail Take Over
This weekend DINO hosted a game jam and interactive project creation session that spanned both Saturday and Sunday. Typically the purpose of a game jam is for teams or lone creators to make a working project in either 24 or 48 hours. Sometimes there is a theme or things that you must incorporate into the piece you make.
Our jam was a bit more casual so I, not really knowing how to code, made a scene out of paper incorporating some creations from Cannon and Yamaha online papercraft communities. I made a short film of me playing with it stop-motion spaghetti western style with music from The Left Handed Gunfighter. I drank the give up beer after with relish.
This epic saga details the attempts of a lone defender of a town ransacked by giant snails. Will the townsfolk perish or will a savior come to the rescue? Watch and see.
13 Steps Away From A Monster
Start with a calming background.
Introduce yourself.
Insert the first signs of distress.
Identify a concerning area of sensory input.
Reinforce this concern.
Add the dawning of horror.
Spotted!
Need more spots.
Don’t forget the wet spot.
Add an alarming turn of events.
Embolden this turn.
Shorten one’s hopes of survival as you see fit.
Enabled and encouraged to eliminate.
Finished!
Business Cards with Teeth
With a pitch to a potential client due the next day and an intense desire to put our best foot forward, there wasn’t much time to make our cards in bulk so I made them the old fashioned way- clicks, beeps, cuts and voila. We’ll probably revise it a bit more later but we each have ultra-gloss spikey works of art.
A Difference in Desks
January 15th, 2010 marked my last day working at the company I had worked at for 6 1/2 years. It was my first job out of college and it was through them that I cut my teeth in the business world. I had been promoted through the ranks from test proctor to school director which I owe to my cheery determination and mulish work ethic.
I had originally gone to school for art-making, graduating at the top of my class with absolutely no idea how to use this degree to make money and live. Not wanting to burden my family and fed up with the starving artist stereotype, I looked for a job with steady income and benefits. By the time I had landed some form of a job I embraced the 9 to 5 culture as it felt like I was contributing to a greater something and giving back to society.
If you are an artist and you get a steady job with a set schedule it’s easy to say you’ll find time to create. The reality is very different- there is no on/off switch to creation. Once you get invested into the place where you spend most of your time, evenings and weekends are spent unwinding, not inducing the giddy rush of creating. Staunching that after it starts leaves me feeling empty and unsatisfied.
After getting to a certain point in my company career I knew that though all my creature comforts were taken care of there was still something missing. I knew if I ever wanted to create again I needed to fully dedicate my time to it. Despite reigning back the urge there was little that could change this large part of me, except for the gradual accumulation in years of a 9 to 5 mentality. As I write I am still under the grip of the perspective of the world that comes with intense multi-tasking and high level customer service.
Making the decision to quit my job to open an interactive design studio with my friends was not easy but so far it’s the best decision I’ve ever made. And I owe the process of my realization and understanding of my abilities to that company I spent so long at. I know we’ll do well because I’ve done well, and I know we have what it takes because I have what it takes.
To the left is my desk at my old job. To the right is my desk now. I like where this is going.
The Logo Creation Process of DINO
This weekend I created the logo for DINO interactive studio. Aaron had a fun idea on a post-it note that I ran with. I drew a couple sketches then took pictures and loaded them into Adobe Photoshop. After playing around a bit Aaron opened my eyes up to the wonderful world of vector aesthetics and I used Adobe Illustrator to smooth and perfect the rest.
Next up is our main page!
Interactive Paper Art
It’s been a while since I’ve worked on this but here are two examples of a simple way to integrate LED lights into a piece of art to change the story and engage the viewer with the 2-dimensional surface of the drawing. In Robodino Bond, pressing the dinosaur’s heart causes the robot’s electronic heart to light up:
And in RIP My Love, pressing your fingers against the gravestone makes the ghost’s eyes light up with electric anger:
I’d like to explore this further and build an interactive childrens book around simple switches, buzzers and lights embedded in the art of the piece. So many wonderful projects to explore! So little time!
Ambient Text Mashup of Modest Mouse
Processing is amazing. I can’t say enough good things about an open source intuitive language built to allow *everyone* easy access to a wide array of tools and resources made for developing visual programs and interactive fun.
This weekend I took part in Music Hack Day at the Microsoft Startup Labs in Cambridge and built an audio/visual mashup of a few different libraries from Processing and music from the EchoNest. My boyfriend James helped a lot with the coding and though he had not created anything in Processing before, his knowledge of Java made it a cinch.
The visual loads the lyrics of the song and makes repeating words larger. The title and chorus words of the song throb to the beat of the music while turning red. The one we did was a demo but it could be modified to any song and have it be an interesting way to take in the artist’s message as well as listening to the melody. Oh yeah and we won an iPod Nano for it! Pretty good weekend all around.
Here’s an image taken from the visual and a link to the applet.
Levels of ’stashe
This was a fun project- the mustache man below is the main character in a game created in Processing by my friends and I over this past weekend. The basic premise to the game is that you play the role of a newspaper editor trying to maintain a balanced coverage of news stories coming through the web. Link!
Project I Feel
I’ve been working on a new way to tell stories. This abstract grouping of icons and circles is meant to visually depict in simple terms a captured moment of time from my sensory world. I hope to post more of these so that I can spot trends and develop the visual language. I’d like to make this into a larger project and link people’s individual stories together too.
