Chris McCormick

Hunt is an augmented reality game. Players enter the game by downloading it onto their mobile, where it runs in the background all of the time.

Whenever the player goes into a public place such as a shopping centre or park, they become "in-play". They can also enter the "in-play" state by requesting a quarry at any time and the server will assign a geographically proximous quarry for them to hunt. A player will often be quarry and hunter at the same time.

In order for the player to claim a frag, they must locate their designated quarry in the public space and aim their mobile's camera at the other player. On the screen the quarry's unique icon will appear over the other player. Once the hunter snapshots the icon and player together, they claim the frag. The quarry can defeat this by doing the same to the hunter first. The snapshot must contain an icon with a clearly visible person beneath it to be a valid frag.

If a player is in a public place and they become a quarry, they will be notified by a normal mobile notification (sound, vibration, sms, etc.). If the hunter is within a certain distance, the quarry will be notified with a different "danger" sound.

A website tracks frags by player, area, etc. Frag verifications are crowd-sourced on the site or by email, sms, etc. Random users will be asked to verify the frags of other players.

This is a free album of breakbeats, bloop-bleeps, and guitars which I never properly released. So now I am. It is Creative Commons licensed, so feel free to download, copy, share it if you like it.

Enjoy!

It would be nice if a few more people hear it, so if you like it I would really appreciate it if you blog/tweet or whatever about it.

This album was composed with a type of old school software called a tracker early this decade, which was and still is often used to make video game music.

Thanks for listening.

On the train back up to Edinburgh at the moment, drinking a red wine, watching the sunset, and also connected to the internet. That last bit is still flipping me out. As my friend Fenris said when I told him about this:

you could only get more futuristic than that if the train was travelling around a Culture orbital.

Trains are so damn cool.

One of the practical consequences of using proprietary software is that your right to use that software can be revoked at any time. Recent conflict between Ebay/Skype and the founders of Skype is an illustration of this. Ebay themselves, and millions of Skype users who rely on Skype for their day to day communications with family, business associates, and friends, have put themselves at risk by choosing proprietary software and protocols. Another illustration of this was the music software Logic Pro which alienated its Microsoft Windows user base when Apple bought the product in July 2002, and discontinued the Windows version. Quite apart from events like that, companies often close down, get bought out, go bankrupt, or discontinue a former line of software. This is as true for modern "cloud based" companies like Google as it has always been for companies like Apple and Microsoft. When you invest your time and energy in proprietary software, and software with closed formats, you are disempowering yourself. Free and Open Source Software is, practically speaking, a much safer bet.