ongoing works and pieces currently in development
Using the Unreal Engine to create a collaborative multimedia enviro-instrument — part installation, part performance, and part multiplayer musical instrument. Essentially constructing a stylized map with lots of background sounds and "sonified" interactive elements. Players wander inside this dynamic virtual soundscape, triggering sounds, visual elements, and other events.
At 8-months old, my daughter Jane started expressing great interest in all things with push-buttons — her toys, remote controls, and especially game controllers (try clobbering goblins when your very own goblin is monkey-ing with the controls). Jane also enjoys playing with this online "coloring book" game where she smashes the keyboard and a drawing on the screen gets filled with colors. I figure if she likes playing with the controller, and she can establish a connection between smashing the keyboard and changing the display on a screen, then maybe she'd like to play a game — video games for babies!
It is for this particular project that I figured out how to use a game controller in flash.
It's Pong! Well, almost — ping is a 2-player Pong clone that can be played over a network, with some nifty features like curve balls and a "power-up" ability where the "paddle" builds up force as it remains motionless, thereby making the return velocity faster. It's not fancy-looking as of yet, but i'm still working on it so it will no doubt suffer from feature creep in the visuals department. Primarily this is about taking an old game and improving it — something that may prove to be a useful classroom exercise.
An artificial ecosystem of sound-producing "orGhanisms" suitable for real-time algorithmic musical composition. These organisms exist within a 3d environment and interact with the environment and other organisms based on species-specific behaviors. Basic artificial intelligence will allow for a variety of self-created patterns of behavior to emerge, and thus create analogous musical patterns in the composition. Players influence the composition by adding/removing organisms, modifying rates of reproduction, or through direct manipulation of the environment or the organisms directly.
