#029: Plasma Blob

This one isn’t terribly impressive, but it was made in a few minutes to demonstrate Processing to a colleague and is reasonably nice to look at.

#030: Mara’s Ocean

A typographic variation of #028: Isles using the Mara’s Eye font.

#031: Chimera Maker: What Has Science Done?!

The sillyness levels go through the roof with this one. For executables for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android and for more pictures, check out it’s own blog post!

#032: Grass Tree

Another ad-hoc Processing tutorial I gave for a ground of friends. This one was a bit more involved than #029: Plasma Blob and looks pretty nice!

#033: Dance of the Fireflies

An experiment with boids/flocking. Unfortunately a little dark-ish, so it’s best observed at night – just like real fireflies!

#034: Living Constellations

Stars float around and form constellations with nearby other stars.

#035: Smoky Silk

Yet another silk variation.

Download

Windows (32 bit)

Windows (64 bit)

Source Code (GitHub, MIT license)

Instructions:

• Plasma Blob: Left-click to refresh.
• Maras Ocean:
  • Left-click or X to refresh.
  • Right-click or C to refresh, but keep color palette.
  • Middle-click or V to refresh, but switch colors.
• Grass Trees:
  • Left-click to refresh.
  • Right-click to instantly finish growing.
• Dance of the Fireflies
  • Left-click to refresh.
  • Middle-click to take 1000 steps and pause.
  • Right-click to pause/unpause.
  • A to refresh and finish 1000 steps with same color.
  • S to refresh and finish 1000 steps with changed color.
• Living Constellations
  • Left-click to refresh.
  • Right-click to pause/unpause.
• Smoky Silk
  • Left-click to refresh.
  • Middle-click to take 1000 steps and pause.
  • Right-click to pause/unpause.

If you’re not on Windows, fret not; for some reason I can’t compile for Mac and Linux, but you can just download Processing and open the sketch files. Sometimes you need to add a library, but mostly it’s really straightforward. If you need any help doing that, just send me a mail or comment here.

Asset Credits:

• Sounds by Moritz Ufer
• Video music by Kevin MacLeod

Each round your previous actions are replayed,
but your and your enemy’s actions will change the
outcomes of previous moves by placing new tokens.

You can play the game in your browser or download the Android APK.

I think the concept is quite intriguing, but the current execution is flawed. Currently, the tokens of the current starting player start first which leads to fluctuating patterns. Also, no matter how experienced you are in the game, you still cannot beat new players who grasp the concept by a significant score and even you pull of a cool move that should get you in the lead, it often doesn’t really matter much.

What I really like though is being the starting player in a round can both be an advantage and a disadvantage: You will move first and can force the second player to defend a certain position, but in certain situations you might need to defend an important position before the other player moves to attack there – and then the other player obviously will place somewhere else.

Anyway, long story short: I might make another game based on the recording/replaying multi-round concept in the future and I sure hope that one will be a lot more fun. More years of experience have to be good for something, right?

Retcon was made by me, with assets by:

• Music: Kevin MacLeod
• Logo Font: Dupe by words+pictures

Connector

Rotate the center and the bubbles coming in to connect same-colored bubbles.

Survive with as many points as possible!

Play in the Webplayer or on Android.

Credits:

• Idea & Programming: Tobias Wehrum
• Music: Steven O’Brien

Aubjects

Your job is to locate six mysterious Aubjects
on a foreign planet – via triangulation.
To make it more exciting, you decided to have a contest!

Enclose exactly one Aubject to score.
For every additional enemy probe you get one bonus point.

Become the Master Triangulator in:
Aubjects, a game of skill for two players.

Play it right in your browser!

Download it for:
Windows
Android

Credits:

• Programming: Tobias Wehrum
• Sound: Moritz Ufer
• Music: Kevin MacLeod
• Font: The Northern Block
• Textures: E. van Zummeren and Tim Ward (via SubtlePatterns)

This game is based on a board game made at the HTW Berlin, designed by:

• Tobias Müller
• Anthea Neums
• Nathanael Siering
• Tobias Wehrum
• Florian Wokurka

• The Player holds a tablet with a soundboard, showing buttons like “Left”, “Right” or “Grab”.
• The Robot is blindfolded and has a smartphone with headphones – and when the player presses a button, the robot hears what he pressed.

It’s still no game, but a VERY fun toy! I recorded three videos to show what the current prototype can do:

For those interested, here is the complete soundboard:

And here are the voice samples for you to listen to! I love the last one.

Inspiration

While I like to think that I came up with the idea myself, I obviously had inspirations. Here are those I can remember:

• Signal Delay by ChrisGaudino: A Ludum Dare prototype about remotely controlling a mars rover.
• Octodad by Young Horses, Inc: Octodad – Loving Father. Caring Husband. Secret Octopus. A game where you pretend to be a human by doing mundane tasks, but being an octopus with an incredible awkward control scheme makes this quite hard and incredibly funny.

Credits

• Programming: Tobias Wehrum
• Sounds: Iwan Gabovitch
• Music: Kevin MacLeod
• Font: Hafizul Wananda Putra

Thanks a lot to our artist and the robots in the videos! Our sandwich-making robot is Adam “PunyOne” Streck. If he isn’t making sandwiches, he’s making games – you can find some of them at http://justaconcept.org!

The October Berlin Mini Jam was crazy enough – we had a triple splitscreen with blinds made out of cardboard and and a MakeyMakey game using fruits and vegetables as controllers. (“And to shoot, you just touch the plum.”)

Fueled by this energy, I made this toy prototype for the theme “Lab Experiment”:

Remote Person Control

One person gets a computer and
a gamepad: The Controller.

One person gets a smartphone, earphones
and closes their eyes: The Robot.

The Controller can now steer the Robot
with transmitted voice commands:
“Left, left, stop, forward, forward…”

Like I say in the video, it’s not finished. It is just a toy right now – I ran out of time to make it a game. I’m thinking about adding commands like “Move your body” and “Move your right hand” so you can actually steer the Robot’s hands too – and then have a command like “grab” to pick up stuff, for example.

The prototype was already a fun experience even with just simple directional controls though. It feels really interesting to use a gamepad to control something in real life (and a human on top of it) instead of something on the screen!

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs

While working with Unity is normally a pleasure and developing Android has proven to be far more straightforward than other mobile platforms, this time I just got terribly unlucky. Here is how I spent my time:

• 4h reading up on and implementing the network stuff (connecting, waiting, synchronizing and dealing with disconnects)
• 0,5h getting and eating food
• 1,5h “fun” while trying to get Unity/ADB to recognize the HTC Nexus One Mini Christiaan lent me
• 1h “fun” with “Unable to find suitable jdk installation Please make sure you have a suitable jdk installation. Android development requires at least JDK 6 (1.6)”
• 15min “fun” with “Error building Player: ArgumentException: Illegal characters in path.”
• 40min of actually implementing the gameplay: Input/Sound
• 5min testing and generally being a happy person

Closing Words

And now, a screenshot from the video, so that Facebook etcetera knows which image to use:

Who knows where exactly I’ll take this? Certainly not me, although I have some ideas. Maybe the next jam will be the time to find out!

]]> https://blog.dragonlab.de/2013/09/remote-person-control-first-jam-prototype/feed/ 1 1417 https://blog.dragonlab.de/2013/07/massive-defense/ https://blog.dragonlab.de/2013/07/massive-defense/#respond Mon, 22 Jul 2013 12:48:52 +0000 http://blog.dragonlab.de/?p=1219 Continue reading Massive Defense: A Cooperative Game for 27″ Touchscreens and Android Tablets]]> Game Jam time! And when I saw Heiko with this beauty of a touchscreen, I knew that I had develop for this. We wanted to do something where players can cooperate against a common thread. 8 hours later, we had this:

Massive Defense

An asteroid storm threatens your mission,
but your trusty spaceships stand ready.

Defend your home base!
Defend your friends!

Try to survive as long as possible in this
cooperative asteroid defense game for 4 players.

Exclusively for 27″ touchscreens!
(Or alternatively for 4 XBox360 gamepads.)

Download:

Windows (Gamepad Version)
Windows (Touchscreen Version)
Android

Video

While it’s certainly possible to play on a tinier touchscreen, playing it on 27″ was a lot of fun! Here’s a video of us playing it at the jam:

Credits

Programming:

• Tobias Wehrum
• Heiko Weible
• Richard Wepner

Art:

• Kelsey Bass
• S. Astrid Bin

Sound Design:

• Petard Haughie

Music:

• Kevin MacLeod

Fonts:

• S. Astrid Bin
• Brian Kent