Experiments Category

• By Rich

  Tags

  flickr, painting, prototype, water

  Posted in

  Experiments

  4 comments

  Flickr Water Painting Demo

  17th Sep 2009

  4

  I had an idea for a game where you had to restore colour to the world, by speeding around in a boat and dropping colour bombs onto the greyscale picture below. I thought it’d be fun if the images were pulled in from Flickr dynamically, creating a constant ever-changing sea of levels.

  A few hours and a prototype later, and I realise it’s not actually going to work after all. There’s just no easy way to control what comes back from Flickr – you can’t search for images which just have “Big” sizes available, and you can’t easily exclude black and white images, which totally ruin the painting part of the game! There are also commercial issues with the Flickr API Keys needed to search and request images. So in the end what was a nice idea in theory, turned out to be a bit crappy in reality.

  However I was left a random but pretty prototype. I’ve removed the boat/gameplay element, so it’s just the water painting demo hooked into Flickr.

  Lots of pictures come back with “Image not available“, so just search again. If it seems to hang for a while after clicking Search, then just search again! Paint with the left mouse button. Sometimes it works right away, and sometimes only on the third or so attempt.

  [swfobj src=”http://sandbox.photonstorm.com/painterFlickr.swf” width=”640″ height=”480″]

  One of my artist friends commented that this made him look at the use of colour in a whole different light. He said that as you start filling the image in, the colours that come through are often totally different to what you’d expect – and when the colour is presented in low volumes it can often look very wrong. As if your brain has substituted the colours for you, and when they don’t match it gets confused.

  I think there’s something quite calming / feng shui about it all personally.

• By Rich

  Tags

  asteroids, flint, glitter, particles, thrust

  Posted in

  Experiments

  8 comments

  Glitter Thrust

  25th Apr 2008

  8

  I was playing around with Flint 1.0.2 and a bit of Asteroids ship code that I had (from the Keith Peters AS3 Animation book.) I had the emitter following the ship, leaving a nice particle trail as it went. And then it occurred to me – why not make the particle renderer a mask for an image? A couple of minutes later and the end result surprised even me! Fly around with the cursor keys, as you do so your ship will push the swirling black smoke away revealing the picture behind, leaving a trail of shiny glitter particles as it does so.

  [swfobj src=”http://sandbox.photonstorm.com/glitter_man.swf” width=”550″ height=”400″]

• By Rich

  Tags

  flint

  Posted in

  Experiments

  3 comments

  Playing with Flint

  10th Apr 2008

  3

  Damn I love messing with Flint – it is one seriously cool particle system 🙂 This is a little test I threw together tonight in about half an hour (includes creating the planet image!). Leave it for a few seconds to see the planet trail burn up, and then just click anywhere you want to re-position the gravity well!

  [swfobj src=”http://sandbox.photonstorm.com/planet1.swf” width=”640″ height=”480″]

  Code wise it’s extremely simple:

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