Recspec Annex at The Museum of Human Achievement, Austin TX, June 29th, July 6th 2024, July 13th 2024
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. Works in the space explore themes of history and fantasy, technology and a conception of the future, and of mining and extraction.
related: The dungeon mode of games
Skip forward with }
Skip back with {
More ➜Salamander Days in Banská Štiavnica remind the former fame of the most beautiful mining town in Slovakia, inscribed in the List of the Cultural and Natural Heritage of the UNESCO. The Days are concluded by a carnival procession. […] Link
More ➜“Dynamite Nashville”: FBI Role in Civil Rights-Era Bombings Revealed, Linked to Later Racist Attacks […] Link
click for a new word
The show I just wrapped was kind of conceptually overloaded, but it was useful as a kind of high-level survey of the stuff I’m wrangling right now, and the goal was to find new ways to connect the tile art I’ve been doing, which is of the Dungeon Mode, to dungeons-as-mines, which was an underdeveloped chunk of my thesis writing that just kept blowing up as I would find more and more readings and more weird kismets piled up in my life related to it.
More ➜Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain’s northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. […] Link
Last Saturday of the show was very nice, I had a lovely long walkthrough talk with Kristen Lucas and Joe McKay. I had a nice chat with an old friend about the Geomancy Sketch that pops up in my main piece for the show, which was something I was fiddling with while I was in a SFPC class. I also think my typical fretting during the installation and opening overshadowed the really nice interactions I was having in the space on the first two nights. I had a great long talk with my super talented studio neighbor Scott Gelber and I got to meet and talk to Lauren Gardner from Babycastles/SFPC.
More ➜
Names like ‘games’ or ‘art’ aren’t actual discrete categories of work, they’re lenses for talking about something that carry with them a set of expectations. With expectations you can talk about a thing critically in a context of other things.
More ➜
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…
More ➜
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.
More ➜
This week worked a lot on trying to get a thyristor dimmer working with an arduino and geiger counter.
More ➜
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.
More ➜
Pulling the roguelike game from the electron app. It seemed fine yesterday but today I had issues:
More ➜
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.
More ➜
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.
More ➜
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
