I chose to create my sprites in pixel art style, and let me tell you it is an under-appreciated art style; pixelating Björk consisted of me defining and implementing a color strategy that took about half an hour for the small span of 12 x 12 pixels! Maybe I was too much a perfectionist about it, but I don’t think so.

Here you can see Björk in her normal and death states. I gleaned a lot of inspiration from her Homogenic album, which I thought captured her at her most iconic. After that I asked the other game-makers at the jam what came to mind when they thought of Iceland. Having recently been in the news for the massive volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, we were able to come up with a slew of stereotypical Iceland things.

Vikings, hot springs and a bankrupted coin sprite were made. Next I set about defining the minions of the hideous world-crushing creature from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”.

As well as the Big Boss Cthulhu of the final fight scene.

Note that in their death states, the people turn into angry-eyed zombies and the creatures turn into peaceful-eyed angels. I am not sure why. The Akihabara game engine consists of a main HTML doc of less than 1,000 lines of code that calls 7 relatively small Javascript files and 9 PNG images. My image files ended up being 737kb, and the code files were 151kb, so the entire game was under 1MB! I could fit it on a floppy disk if I so chose! All this able to be run inside any browser capable of supporting HTML5. Really really cool.

After swapping in the sprite sheet and backgrounds I created some witty banter between Björk and Cthulhu, using actual quotes from Björk and her songs. Björk says “I am a fountain of blood. In the shape of a girl.” and Cthulhu says:

And it continues. Cthulhu sics his minions on Björk, she blasts them with fire pellets, and the battles take place over the landscape of Iceland.

Land of both fire…and…ice.

After Björk makes mincemeat out of these gremlin minions and evil vikings, she parlays with the Big Boss.

Her response to this is “All is full of love.” Well said Björk! Now, while I was working with this code I noticed that you could win the game if you just stayed in the position where you were from the beginning and mashed the z button really hard for the whole game. If you aren’t distracted by the Power Up bankrupt coins falling from the sky, you can get through the minions and have 3 Björk lives killed by the Big Boss and still defeat him in the end.

I have to give huge kudos to Kesiev- I’m not a traditional programmer and I know only bits and pieces of HTML and Javascript, but I was able to figure out what I needed to comment out from his code and what I needed to change in order for the game to be up and running pretty quickly. The only thing that’s missing is the audio, but that should be easy to implement in later releases of the code.

Start to finish this game took me 12 hours to make. The thing that has been most trying is working within Wordpress to host the game files in order to display correctly. That is the nice thing about making something like this in HTML5- being able to open it in any browser and play. I haven’t figured this out yet, so I’ve embedded a video of the game from start to finish (it’s 3 minutes long) with me filling in some sound effects and dialogue.

UPDATE: Thanks to my friend Eric Ferraiuolo the game is now playable for all! Can YOU help Bjork defeat Cthulhu? (The “A” Button is the “Z” Button and move with the arrow keys.)  Link!

Over this past week my partners and I at DINO Interactive Studios have developed an iPad application that allows input from a specific grouping of ‘fingers’ from the bottom of three objects. When you place the object on the screen surface of the iPad, flowers and vines grow from underneath the object.

This corresponds to the application as it is a flower growing app called Akina HD, available for free in a human-touch enabled version in the Apple App Store currently. My process in creating this was to take the aesthetic of the app and bring these elements into the objects as if they were an extension of game. The art I made for Akina is derived partly from the art of an interactive book I’m currently working on and plan to release on the iPad soon.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

]]> http://www.emilydaniels.com/2009/11/project-i-feel/feed/ 0 http://www.emilydaniels.com/2009/08/and-dino-is-born/ http://www.emilydaniels.com/2009/08/and-dino-is-born/#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 04:13:30 +0000 admin http://www.emilydaniels.com/?p=165 On or around April 27th,  David Nunez, Aaron Waychoff and I decided to build a space to inspire people to make, do and learn.

It’s main focus is to build the community of hackers & makers in Boston and give people the support and knowledge they need to create and share their projects and ideas. We’ve teamed up with Sprout, a community science center and open studio focused on making science personal and accessible, and took over the lease on a space close to Davis Square-

And since then have painted-

And sat back-

And appreciated being a part of something great.