Category Archives: Projects

Dreaming of Ambienome

By John Croisant | Published: 2009-11-24

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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Your Git Submodule and You

By John Croisant | Published: 2009-08-09

(Pssst. Check out my Git Submodules Cheat Sheet for a quick reference.) This post is the result of my investigations into how Git submodules work and how to use them. My goal in investigating submodules was to decide if they would be an effective way to share specs among the various Ruby FFI implementations (Ruby-FFI [...]

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Nice-FFI 0.1

By John Croisant | Published: 2009-07-05

I’m pleased to announce a small helper library I’ve created, Nice-FFI. It sits on top of Ruby-FFI and makes certain things easier and more convenient. Nice-FFI started out as helper classes I made for Ruby-SDL-FFI (which is coming soon), but I decided to generalize it and make it its own library so that other people [...]

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Droplet Post-Mortem

By John Croisant | Published: 2009-07-04

This is a look back at last weekend’s RubyWeekend #3 game contest and the process of developing my entry, Droplet. You can read more post-mortems from the contest in the Rubygame forums. What went right: I’m really happy with how the plants grow and change and move. I think I got the rustling to be [...]

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Droplet

By John Croisant | Published: 2009-06-28

I’m pleased to present my entry to the RubyWeekend #3 game competition: Droplet. From the README: Droplet is a small musical toy created by John Croisant in 72 hours over the weekend of June 26-28, 2009 for the third RubyWeekend game creation competition. The theme of the competition was “A Tiny World”. The inspiration for [...]

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Droplet – End of Day 3

By John Croisant | Published: 2009-06-28

What’s working: Plants have a limited number of generations, so they don’t start to slow everything down. Plant colors, branch length, and various other attributes are randomized per plant for more variety. You can rustle the plants by moving your mouse cursor around them. This makes them wave back and forth for a while, and [...]

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Droplet – End of Day 2

By John Croisant | Published: 2009-06-27

A quickie progress update and screenshot of my RubyWeekend game, Droplet. What’s working: You can click to make a new plant at the nearest point on the circle. The plants grow a bit when you press spacebar. The plants grow and create new branches based on rules. What’s not: The plants are ignoring their color [...]

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Droplet Thoughts (Day 2)

By John Croisant | Published: 2009-06-26

I’m calling my RubyWeekend #3 game “Droplet”. I will not proceed to ramble about it to help my planning. And you get to read the results, you lucky person you! I’m setting aside the animals/people aspect for the competition. It’s just going to be about the plants. I’m going to use Garage Band’s built-in instruments [...]

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RubyWeekend #3 Game Concept

By John Croisant | Published: 2009-06-26

RubyWeekend #3 kicked off about 8 hours ago, and I’ve been pondering game ideas since then. The theme is “A Tiny World”. I was having trouble coming up with something, but I think I’ve finally got a solid base for a game. It’s still a bit vague, and I haven’t figured out how I’ll turn [...]

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Election Year: Zombies vs. Pirates!

By John Croisant | Published: 2008-06-16

Done! Here’s my entry for RubyWeekend #1! You can follow my previous entries in the zombies-vs-pirates rubyweekend section (they didn’t appear on the home page or in RSS feeds). Here’s the premise of the game: It’s another election year, and the two major political parties, the Zombie Party and the Pirate Party, have chosen their [...]

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