Category Archives: Ambienome

Complicated Code and Creative Blocks

The past several weeks have been a struggle, productivity-wise. First, I spent quite a lot of time working on proto-slots. That may seem productive, but the amount of effort I put into polishing and documenting it was way out of proportion to the benefit I would get from it. I think I did a pretty [...]
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Colored Shapes

I got a bit sidetracked while working on creature components, but still ended up making important progress for the overall system. First, I created a new transform class by abstracting and cleaning up the shape class’s position, angle, and size attributes and methods. I also created a transformable “mixin” class, which can be used by [...]
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Shape Mesh Progress

Yesterday, I completed the code to generate triangle and circle meshes: The triangle looks like it’s too small, but it fits perfectly in the circle, and the circle fits perfectly in the square. Yay, geometry! Of course, when building a creature, they can be scaled to whatever size you like, and the algorithms can produce [...]
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Adventures with the OpenGL shader pipeline

For the past several weeks, I’ve been learning “modern” OpenGL programming practices, by which I mean using a GLSL shader pipeline with vertex and fragment shaders. Even before starting Ambienome, I was already somewhat familiar with the old OpenGL “fixed function pipeline”, using glBegin/glEnd, glColor, glVertex, etc. Ambienome is going to be visually simple enough [...]
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Ambienome – Technology

In my previous post, I described the concept and roadmap for my new project, Ambienome. In this post, I’ll be describing the technology (programming language and libraries) I’m using, and why I chose them. Even though I have seven years of experience with Ruby, and my own game library, Rubygame, already available and ready to [...]
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New Project: Ambienome

I’ve started a new project: Ambienome. This is a game (or, rather, a toy) I’ve wanted to create for years — I blogged about it in May 2007 and November 2009 — and now I’m finally making a serious attempt. I’ll be blogging about my development progress, both to solidify my ideas by putting them [...]
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Dreaming of Ambienome

Lately, I’ve been having visions of a game I’ve been wanting to make for years, which I call Ambienome, a pseudo-portmanteau of Ambient (as in ambient music) and Anemone (the tendrilled sea creature). Both the concept and the name are inspired by Toshio Iwai’s Electroplankton. Like Electroplankton, Ambienome would be more of a musical toy [...]
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Music Toy Idea

I had an interesting idea for a musical sound-generation toy, inspired by Electroplankton. The gist of it is that there is a ”sea anemone” on the screen with 5 or so tendrils; at the end of each tendril is a loop that you can grab and pull with the mouse. Each tendril makes a unique [...]
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Ambient Wildlife and Bouldered Paths

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about sound, color, and abstract artificial life. No doubt that this most recent bout is directly tied to my recent purchase of Electroplankton (the best, albeit only, $60 I’ve spent on Ebay), but all three are recurring themes that have been agitating my brain for years. Wouldn’t it be [...]
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