studio notes 6-16-24
uh oh, I was able to parse branching text in the .ink format inside one of my p5 sketches. It’s going to be hard to resist adding a czech textovka-style text adventure to the sketches before the show…
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Didaktik Gama
May 16, 2024Exhibition History
Recspec Annex at The Museum of Human Achievement, Austin TX, June 29th - July 7th 2024 (Upcoming)
About
Didaktic Gama is a series of game-like media and poetic artworks made with aesthetic and structural restrictions, accompanied by a collection of games and artifacts that contextualize them.
Instructions
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Downloads:
- Didaktik Gama Mac v1.1b.zip, 142 MB (version notes)
- Didaktik Gama Win32 x64 v1.1b.zip, 150 MB (version notes)
Repositories:
- Didaktik Gama (Repo may not be public)
- Geiger counter lamp (Repo may not be public)
Documents:
Diagrams:
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dimmer input output - 06/21/2024
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Illumination - 06/21/2024
didaktik_process
Posts:
studio notes 6-15-24
oh my god, fuck the stupid TRIAC dimmer I have been trying to use for this lamp. It’s haunted, I’m done with it. I’m going to try with a relay instead which should presumably be much simpler. If it works as soon as I get it there’s still a chance I’ll be able to make a fully integrated lamp with a geiger counter that flashes the lamp at its own rad counts. The backup plan is just to have the counter next to the lamp. I like the idea that this visible assurance of safety implies just the opposite. How does a casual viewer know how many ticks are normal and how many are dangerous? The lamp, lit up with an additional stage blacklight nearby looks great on the blue velvet of the table.
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studio notes 5-13-24
This week worked a lot on trying to get a thyristor dimmer working with an arduino and geiger counter.
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Studio notes 6-7-24
I feel pretty good today because while i pulled the roguelike game from the build (1.0b) that I will project, it is actually working great and looking good on the launcher now, which means it will be fine inside the space. I also made an electron version of the Tumblr bot I made a while back that posted pages from the Archon book with generated names, and that was really simple and I think will work well in the launcher. I am also getting permission to include some modern games by other artists that fit, since I am already including games from the past on vintage equipment.
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Studio notes 6-6-24
Pulling the roguelike game from the electron app. It seemed fine yesterday but today I had issues:
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the mine
I cobbled together some writing to go with the installation that suggests games by other artists that could fit in a collection inside the space. I’ve got a Spectrum next… which is pretty novel… and a Mac classic, both with some games that could fit, and i could scare up a pc with a launcher and a few games. I’ve also got a three channel video piece with synced subtitles that Batsly helped with that will fit nicely.
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studio notes 5-3-2024
There’s a date for a show at MoHA- the 29th of next month. I am anxious because the thing that is eating up the most time is this Roguelike game that I have packaged up in an electron app with a bunch of processing sketches. It’s the thing I’m always posting about, and it would be nice to show off in some form but I think I have to make a hard decision to cut it right now. As always! The thing I worked the hardest on needs to go… Because it’s a new game it’s the most brittle and buggy part. I’m sinking more and more time into working on it, but I feel like it’s shit-or-get-off-the-pot-time and I should take it out of what I’m showing, or at the very least, remove it from the stack of processing sketches that I plan on projecting, since it’s a point of failure. It has a zero player mode that was turned on for this projection version and it isn’t very clever, gets stuck a lot, etc. Was it really conceptually that important to this show? Or was it just a thing I worked on a lot and have sunk cost in? If it isn’t that conceptually important, is it fun enough that it would be a draw to the space? Or does it just look cool in screenshots? Can I do something else with it? What if I took a fuckton of screenshots of it generating levels and played them really fast with some narration? That would still be putting it to use and communicating what was hard to do in the experiment without leaving it as this raw point of failure due to lack of testing and debugging.
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studio notes 3-14-2024
Spring break has given me more time to sit and play with projects. No big breakthroughs. I rewired the doorknob plinth from Doors and now the action on all the knobs and doorknob is much nicer than in the show. Unfortunately there’s still communication issues with the blinkm rgb light that lights up the keyhole. It’s possible that I rewired it wrong, but maybe more likely that it’s an OSC issue. It’ll take a little work to remember how it was meant to work and do some troubleshooting, since it was the last feature I added before the show and probably the least documented part of the project.
Do I even want to get this working again though? I can see it being part of a show with more grotto-related stuff, but part of me thinks it’s probably better to concentrate on other stuff.
studio notes 1-1-24
Happy New Year.
Not sure what to tag today’s log, I’m still working with the tileset from Grotto, but it’s moving into other areas, like the cellular automata I started working with a few months ago. I’m starting to take all of the small javascript projects that use the tiles and bring them together into a single repository with a separate node.js app that would hypothetically get input from switches or other devices and then switch between/effect the small projects.
studio notes 11-21-23
I haven’t been posting work notes while the world crumbles, but I’ve been keeping them locally. There’s been a few updates to the unnamed roguelike that are worth mentioning, the first is I’ve been experimenting with a creeping plant class, working off the idea that once the player dies the game keeps going, and plant growth would be nice. Other than that, lots of little tweaks, like refactored item and entity classes, arrows that can spread fire, fire destroying things, and I experimented with multiple player instances, which just worked on the first try.
studio notes 8-17-23
It’s a little confusing to keep calling these posts studio notes, since I no longer have a studio space. I’m sitting in a room at our place back in Austin that’s still filled with unpacked boxes. Settling back in is a slow process, and the last month has been really busy with moving a relative out of this space as we move back in. We also got a new kitten, who we are slowly acclimating to our other cat through a pet gate, carefully negotiating their two territories and resources (is there a strategy game idea somewhere in cats claiming or sharing litter boxes, food dishes, toys and sunbeams?)
studio notes 8-11-23
Still don’t have a project tag for this roguelike experiment yet, but it seems like it might turn into an actual game. Now I’ve added doors, (some of which are locked and have paired, color coded keys,) inventory, enemies, and slightly janky click to pathfind to suppliment arrow key movement. I’m about to add sound with howler.js and audiosprite next.
A big thing that is missing is fog of war. I made kind of a mess getting my Grotto tiles working and it’s not as straightforward as it would be in a normal ascii rot.js game. I’ll give it some consideration once I get sound added.
studio notes 7-10-23
I added fire and death to the little rot.js roguelike game I am tinkering with. This is separate from Grotto but uses the same visual language. It’s a difficult proposition to try to integrate this with Grotto, as this is turn based and Grotto is a multiplayer database driven thing with no understanding of items or characters positions in a room. This feels like a new game so far and not an extension of grotto, although there could be some interactions between the two using Grotto’s API. What should it be? It could either be a totally new dungeon game or I could try doing some sort of zero player ant-hill arcology thing to go with Archon as I had originally imagined. Hmm.
Links:
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