Creation Year: April

After the busy-ness of March, April was a welcome respite and a chance to start working again.  I chose to start a fairly ambitious project...

One of the main ideas of Creation Year was benchmarking.  I had to create things and show them off to people so I could have an idea of how good I was at those things.  With my application to UCSC denied, it became especially important to get my work out there.  I decided to make a goal of showing off a game project or four in an art gallery.


Given that most of Grand Rapids is not terribly aware of the art game scene, I thought a simple premise would be best.  Something that everyone understood on a fairly fundamental level so that they can easily "get" how a game could express that idea.  I figured the seasons would be a good place to start.

Beyond just picking a subject, though, how would I make that happen?  For some time, I've been interested in Perlenspiel, a simple, abstract, web-based game engine.  Created by Prof. Brian Moriarty at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, it's an engine that not only suggests abstraction, but demands it.  It forces both the designer and the player to think more about the systems of interaction than on art or world building or storytelling.  Its high degree of abstraction would, hopefully, help my players "get" the idea of Seasons even better.  Hopefully.

So April began with Spring.  As the trees were blooming outside, I sought to create a simple, game-like interactive toy that expressed the new life, unpredictability, and simple joy of that season.  I finished it just a few days into May.

Currently, the demo of Spring is available here, soon to be hosted on a new website designed by Jared Ransom.