Chris McCormick

"An astronaut stranded on an alien planet, with only a few minutes left to live."

Orchids to Dusk had a powerful effect on me.

I dreamed about the game the night after playing it.

The creative power of code is the microwave background radiation of my subconscious and this game made me notice it again in a visceral way.

Inspirational.

Over the weekend I built a tiny game for Ludum Dare #34. Here it is:

Instructions: grow the white square's heart by clicking and dragging to the other squares.

Link to the game here.

Source code here.

Play/review/rate it here.

A "zero asset game" is a game that does not use any external art assets.

Game art is instead generated procedurally or by using artifacts of the rendering environment.

The following is a screenshot of a tiny game engine I built a little while ago in ClojureScript.

The renderer runs on Facebook's React library so it is just a couple of lines of code.

I've spread it over several lines here for readability:

; DOM "scene grapher"
[:div {:id "game-board"}
  (doall
    (map
      (fn [[id e]]
        [:div {:class (str "sprite c" (:color e))
           :key id
           :style (compute-position-style e)
           :on-click (fn [ev] (sfx/play :blip))}
        (:symbol e)])
      (:entities @game-state)))]

The sprites are utf8 characters which are instantiated like this:

(make-entity {:symbol "◍"
              :color 0
              :pos [-20 300]
              :angle 0
              :behaviour behaviour-rock})

The function behaviour-rock here gets called once per frame and returns the new immutable entity-state for the next frame.

When you click on something the blip sound is generated procedurally in the browser using jsfxr.

This is a video game I made for Scout to help her practice using a gamepad.

Play it! You'll need at least one gamepad and Firefox or Chrome.

• It's hard to find nice games that fit the search "two player gamepad-enabled couch-co-op suitable for four year olds".

• Game design for a four year old is quite nuanced. To make a fun game without all of the normal risk reward mechanics basically comes down to "make rude noises".

• It's 360 lines of ClojureScript, rendered in the browser DOM with React. It took me a handful of evenings over a period of one month to develop.

• I don't play many games, but the gamepad is probably my favourite human-computer interface.

Source code: https://github.com/chr15m/fubbles/

Update

Fubbles is the first game I have made using the new infinitelives ClojureScript library for game development that my friend Crispin and I have been building.

Nearly three years ago I wrote:

Prediction: within 3 years the stylus will be the killer feature of Android tablets.

Since then I've felt a little embarrassed remembering that post. Grand claims, ha ha!

With the recent announcement of Apple's "Pencil" I feel somewhat vindicated. I got the details wrong but I think broadly speaking that hand-drawing, sketches, doodles, will feature strongly in the future of human-to-human communication. Maybe even more strongly than typed messages for some people.

• I'm thinking about the 16% of people worldwide who can't read or write, but who are rapidly adopting hand held technologies where they can draw.

• I'm thinking about the tens of thousands of years of human beings using sticks as a technology for making marks upon a surface.

• I'm thinking about the popularity of emoji, the universality of pictographs, the cross-cultural and language-independent nature of the medium of drawn communication.

• I'm thinking about my kids and how the second thing they learn after talking is drawing.

Maybe one future is a world in which many of our planet's population do a significant fraction of our communication through the medium of doodles.