Monday, June 6, 2011

Nature

"I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree"
-Alfred Joyce Kilmer

It's often said the beauty of nature far surpasses that of man. With the goal of this site being to generate pretty pictures algorithmically, I thought it would be interesting to think about how nature works from this perspective, so we can shamelessly rip off its ideas.

There are a small amount of types

Nature seems to work with "alphabets", ie a small number of types that combine together at different levels to produce different behaviour.

Eg quarks combine to form electrons/protons/neutrons which combine to form the chemical elements. I don't think this is just how science has been modelled by humans, but rather a necessary part of its ability to generate complex outcomes like the universe & nature and intelligent beings like us actually thinking and experiencing it all.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Cloud fighter v0.1

One benefit of procedural content generation is to get a lot of content from a little bit of code. Traditionally this was done with clever algorithms, but another way is to utilise online cloud services to generate content for you. A huge proportion of the effort required to make a game similar to 1942 is art and design of levels. By abusing free online services and the hard work of thousands, I can make a very quick version in minutes using Javascript. Click the image to play & use the arrow keys to turn and space to drop bombs. Note: the game is currently really crap with no death or ending. I've been really slack on finishing this off, but will get around to it one day.