Content warning: This one has a lot of flashing colours!
So I was thinking about arcade games, and how they're almost always focused on numbers, whether that's high scores or timers. And I was wondering what an arcade game would look like where the goal wasn't to get the high score, or set the fastest time.
So arpeggiate the world is an avoid-em-up arcade game where the goal is just to keep the music going. With an arpeggiating synth as the main instrument, you collect pickups which each add an element to the music (an extra octave for the arpeggiator, percussion, effects, etc.), and orbit around you when collected. If an orbiting pickup collides with one of the enemies, you lose it (and that music element). If you lose all your orbiters the music stops and the game is over.
This is one of those times where I didn't really understand what I was making until I'd made it. I was thinking the goal would be to keep the music going, but in practice I find myself intentionally colliding with enemies to remove musical elements so things are more musically interesting and fluid. I'd love to see more people exploring this area of mediated composition/improvisation/gameplay.
Big influences for this one are Tom Sennett's Ultralight Beam, and the arpeggiator in Propellerheads' Europa web synthesizer.
Download arpeggiate the world
Controls: escape: quit; cursor keys: move; space: start game
The Rules:
- The file at this link will be deleted 1 month from now (2/4/22).
- All downloads are zipfiles containing a Windows executable.
- All source code and assets are included, licensed under the GPL (code) and CC_BYSA (assets).
- As long as you abide by those licenses, you can do whatever you want with the download.
Further Reading
Elizabeth Sandifer's reached Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol in her long-running Last War in Albion series, and seeing how much of Crazy Jane's story is taken from Truddi Chase's real-life autobiography is seriously disturbing.
Sandifer's post is the first time I've come across the concept of plurals though, and doing some follow-up reading I had one of those moments where you realise the world is so much bigger and stranger than you ever would have guessed. Plus, this line at the end of pluralityresource.org's What is Plurality? page:
"The best we can do is gather together to help each other make sense of whatever we may have in common, and to find that perhaps we are not alone."
I've been listening a lot to Sons of Kemet this month, particularly Pick Up your Burning Cross.
An excellent long read by Claire L. Evans about the early hacker Susy Thunder.
Richard Seymour arguing for an alternative vision of self help:
"Self-help is cognate with the ideal of mutual aid, out of which modern trade unions, landless worker movements, squatter groups, cooperative associations and so on, emerged. It is no coincidence that self-help literature rose alongside the collapse in class and civic organisation, and the surge in new mutual aid groups formed by patients, addicts, sexual abuse survivors, and others."
People are doing some really cool things with Bitsy 3D.
I loved this oneiric walking sim by Jacob Potterfield.
Tim Maughan with a vicious satire working through the implications of NFT culture.
This marks 3(!) years of here and then gone. That feels weird. I'm going to try and look back over every here and then gone project on twitter over the next few days. Hope you're keeping well in spite of the endlessly horrifying news. Take care out there.