Done. Sort of.

The final critique is in 6 hours, and the game is as finished as it is going to be.

The only things not working that I want to put in are AI interaction with each other; all they do right now is swim around waiting for you to eat them or mate with them. They never die unless you eat them, either. There are a few other bugs to work out as well, but I'm confident in the concept of the project and I think we've met our most important goals.

So now it's on to making a power point presentation.

You can visit the 'beta release' on the 'beta' website, edge-project.tripod.com. Jackie is a bit overwhelmed with her biomedical work, so no update to the site other than to upload the game, which probably won't happen until 1, before we have the critique.

We don't have instructions up yet, but it's fairly intuitive. It follows your mouse and you make it run into other organisms. Then you make moral decisions. Or fun ones. Or perhaps bored ones. Whatever the case, please try out our game and give some feedback.

Last Work Day

Right now, Jackie is working on inserting the game as-is into the website.

If it's up and you try playing it, it really doesn't do much. Still.

You can input some text that gets translated into "DNA" which gets translated into a tiny organism. Yours is the one with the red arrow that always points towards the mouse. If you click the mouse, the game will pause (just a debug function; I'm working on the mating/eating thing next, which needs a pause function so that the user can choose options, etc.).

As the game progresses, the organisms will become more complex. We hope, anyways.

The game is almost-sorta-near completion. One more week of work, and it should be ready for the big critique.

semester end closing in

http://edge-project.tripod.com/

Ok, so the website is looking rather snazzy. It is up, and you can see it, and there are actually things on it to look at now. So feedback would be greatly appreciated!

... because we haven't got any yet :[

The game is looking fantastic and I am very very excited, hopefully we are going to get a test up on the website shortly. That's that for now! :D

BREAKTHROUGH

After getting practically no help from the 3 forums I posted to, I finally had a breakthrough.

IT MOVES!

This sounds really pathetic, since I've been working on it for, what, a month or 2? But I don't care, I'm finally getting somewhere and it feels great.

Right now, the shapes are overlapping when they're supposed to be next to each other, so I need to fix that, but now I can finally move on to making this game happen.

And I thought just making the little organism was going to be the easy part... Just think what I'll have to go through to make autonomous organisms...

Sample will be uploaded as soon as I iron out the bugs.

5 Weeks Remaining

Jackie has successfully drawn up the website. You can actually visit the prototype (with no game currently) at edge-project.tripod.com.

I can't say as much for myself, however.

I'm still tearing my hair out trying to make this happen in Flash. I'm stuck trying to get the organism to follow the mouse.

Yes, I'm that behind.

Unfortunately, I can't go any farther until I solve this problem. I've posted on 3 big Flash forums (ActionScript.org, Flashkit, and Kirupa) and no help yet. Last time I had a problem (drawing the polygon shapes dynamically) I posted on ActionScript.org before going to bed and had a solution the next morning. Hopefully, the same thing will happen this time, with 3 solutions to pick from. I have it all coded, and I feel like it should work, but I'm probably missing some obscure detail that's probably counter-intuitive and takes 4 years of actionscripting before getting used to.

That's all for now. I'll update again when I get an answer.

Spring break

Or, as it should be called "winter break 2," considering there's absolutly nothing spring about this weather in Cleveland, at least for those not as fortunate to be going on vacations.

Well Spring break was spent working a lot, and relaxing a little. I spent a large chunk of this week fighting with Dreamweaver, considering I haven't used it, there were a lot of lynda.com tutorials involved, and a lot of stress, but now that I've got the very basic skeleton of the website going, things are looking much better compared to a few days ago, or even a few hours ago. Cory has had a huge ammount of work to do in other classes so that's what he has been focusing his energy on, not much to report on the programming of the actual game. Starting to get nervous, but I know we will pull it off.

That's all for now.

MIDTERM

Wow, tomorrow is the midterm presentation, and we don't have much to show for all of our hard work. The new flash application is no farther along (or dare I say, less far along) than the original Processing script.

Thankfully, Knut, our Prof, is very understanding. He said that he "loves failure." I think he meant to say that "we learn more from failure than from success"; perhaps something got lost in translation from his native Swedish to English.

Jackie has been working hard on the website design: a nice "logo" graphic and the main buttons have been masterfully executed in Photoshop. Here is a preview:
Hopefully the website layout will be done soon. And perhaps the game will be done sooner? Probably not. But one can dream.

headaches

Today was a set-back. After discovering there would be no simple solution to adding text input with processor, we decided to take everything we've been working on and translate it into Flash. It is taking a lot of time we do not have, and is tedious, but it is better than trying to continue to work in a program that is going to limit us in the end. Midterms and a huge amount of work in other classes has a lot limited the amount of time we've been able to spend with the project, but we are making and honest effort to spend more time with it and push on. The stuff for the website is coming along. Still need to figure out what's going on with the web space, but it seems we've got our hands full with other things right now. More to come.

Web-hosting

So today we continued working on the organism generator, and figuring out what the website is actually going to look like. Made some icons which you will be seeing possibly soon. We are basically waiting to find out what we will be getting for this class as far as web space, but we'd like this to be something more permanent and not just for this class. Neither of us have a clue how to actually publish a website, aside from playing around with free personal websites back in the day. We have run into some problems already in regards to free-hosting and file types that can or cannot be uploaded. We don't want to get stuck hosting this website somewhere that we might regret later. That's about it. Trying to get all of the pieces we need compiled together. The sooner we can get something rolling and actually test this out, the better it will be.

Prototype Organism Generator

I've finished working on the POG (Prototype Organism Generator) v0.1b. So far, a simple organism made of polygons will travel towards your mouse. If you click, a new random organism will be generated.

Already there is a bug: sometimes the organism doesn't show up at all. Hopefully I'll be able to fix that soon.

EDIT: I fixed it. The variables were set up so that the segments could possibly be 1 sided--which doesn't work. I changed it so that the smallest amount of sides is 2. Unfortunately, Google Pages isn't letting me upload anything else for some reason, so you'll have to suffer with the buggy one for now.

EDIT: Switched to Freewebs. Unfortunately, I can only upload ONE file at a time. But I tried GeoCities, and it doesn't support uploading .pde (processing) files, so I had no choice. If anyone has a suggestion as to what free hosting site we should be using (if anyone even reads this at all) please leave a comment.

Here's the link: POG v0.1b

Jackie is currently working on a styleguide for the website. She's experimenting with icon designs. We really like this science icon set. Samples to be uploaded soon.

We outlined the project concept, goals, audience, etc. It basically consists of what's already written on this site, but we wanted one document that clearly outlined what we're setting out to accomplish.

Research

OK so today we've continued working on the programming and our goal is to create a prototype random organism generator. This will let us know if our code for the organisms DNA is actually working, and creating our organism. Actually thats more or less our goal for the week I've been reading the book "Biomedia" by Eugene Thacker as a suggestion from Amanda. We've spent some time playing with other similar games and simulations. I really enjoyed the "Evolites," and left it running on my computer for a few days altering the settings and seeing what happened. Eventually the game became so huge my computer crashed being unable to process the giant organisms I had "created." Also my niece allowed me to experience "Webkinz," which is essentially a virtual pet world much like "Neopets," which I remember growing up with (I can surprisingly still get on my old account! So can Cory, I feel like a nerd), and the Facebook application "FluffFriends." Basically you adopt a creature and play games to earn points or money to spend on food, clothing, and accessories for your creature. I've also been thinking about Pokemon, or at least the latter versions of the video game, when it was no longer "cool," which allowed the player to mate his monsters to create different monsters which were inaccessible otherwise. Cory says I need to mention "Dragon Warrior Monsters," in which it was necessary to mate your monsters to advance in the game and earn more powerful and rare monsters. It is available on the Nintendo DS as "Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker."

I also stumbled on this amazing site similar to "Second Life," a MMO community, called "Metaplace." (You can read the news article here). It has JUST come out and is still in the testing phase which means we won't be able to play it for some time, but I can't wait to see what it's all about. The basic idea is a world where you can create absolutly anything, it is based off of the book "Snow Crash," by Neal Stephenson which we were supposed to read in the Integrated Media Elective I took last year in the Spring. We've also added some links on the side to other interesting blogs about science and technology, as well as a video about Programming DNA which we HIGHLY recommend watching.

Knut has been showing us some interesting Bacteria games, one of which is John Conway's Game of life. Another one we found is here. The name of it is litterally just "Bacteria."

OK, OK back to work then, we'll let you know when we get something actually working :]

The Beginning

Today we began programming.

But first--The concept solidifies:

The main page of the website will hold the Java applet (made in Processing) -
- Shows the "top" Organism
- Text box below in which the user enters a name
- Clicks "play" to begin the game (game uses user's name to generate the 1st organism's DNA)

The Game -
- User's Organism is immersed in an environment full of randomly generated organisms (some simpler, some more complex)
- The Organism follows the user's mouse
- Option to mate with or eat other organisms to evolve or survive
- After mating occurs, the user has a choice of one of three offspring
- Generated organisms grow in complexity as successive generations are produced
- Generated organisms will mate and eat each other
- Once the user's Organism reaches a certain point (perhaps based on complexity) they meet the "top" organism and have the option to mate with or eat it, therefore producing a new "top" organism
- Information about the Organism is displayed on the side, i.e. DNA

The Details -
- Organisms will be generated through a number of flexible characteristics defined by a DNA class
- Possibility of different polygonal shapes, colors, and any number of segments (think snake-like)
- After this system is programmed and implemented, other traits may be added, like cilia (hairs), eyes, spikes, etc.

So far the code doesn't do anything, but we've got a bunch of parts that work, such as a follow-the-mouse script and a polygon-generator (thanks to Ira Greenberg). But now we are both tired. More to come soon.

Brainstorming

Jackie and I have had a chance to talk to many of our professors for ideas and preemptive feedback. Somehow, we've got a lot of people interested in (and dare I say excited about?) our project.

Hopefully we won't disappoint anyone!

After many brainstorming sessions (with more foreseen in the future), we've come up with a somewhat feasible idea. We figured that we should solidify our ideal concept first, and figure out how to implement it later.

Concept so far:

- MMOG-esque, a la Endless Forest, but also browser-based and AFFORDABLE for us to host (somehow)
- relatively simplistic style, i.e. 2D environment & simple-shape organisms
- indirectly-user-created organisms (perhaps based on a name/IP address)
- automated organisms created by the program/website
- users' organisms mate with others (automated or not) to create new, slightly mutated organisms
- the user chooses which offspring (out of 3 or so) lives
- organisms have base attributes that make up its genotype (i.e. size, speed, strength, etc.)
- attributes originally created by user-data, i.e. name/IP
- attributes are expressed as shapes/features, a la the phenotype
- needs environmental factors (this part is still a little fuzzy)
- "genetic code" should be visible, perhaps as abstract barcode-like graphic, instead of a "name"

These are merely features that we would like to see implemented in our project. Some may be dropped and some may be added as we progress, obviously. As soon as we decide a few things, such as our intended audience and goal of this piece, perhaps ways of implementing the aforesaid list may become clearer.

I've been thinking abstractly about how some of this stuff may be programmed eventually. The stuff I read about genetic algorithms was really enlightening as to how the general principle works. I think I might have a preliminary concept of how the "DNA" will work, as well as how the combining of genes, i.e. reproduction, will be realized. The "attributes" of these organisms are simple variables, such as "speed = 5," and can be thought of as their DNA. When two organisms "mate," their variables will be cut up and recombined in a coherent fashion. As an example:

OrganismA's size=10; a random number between 0-10 is selected, let's say 7
OrganismB's size=5; a random number between 0-5 is selected, let's say 2

7+2=9, therefore their offspring OrganismC's size=9

This way, if two organisms with equal sizes mate, their offspring will generally be the same size as their parents, but this also leaves room for variation.

Though perhaps the number selected should be half the original value instead of a random number, and a mutation probability could offset the amount slightly.

Either way, some things fell as if they're falling into a coherent structure.

By the way, ideas and links to other resources are welcome.

The Project

Before I describe anything, a bit of background information is necessary.

I, Cory Hughart, am a T.I.M.E. major at the Cleveland Institute of Art. T.I.M.E. stands for "Technology and Integrated Media Environment"; it's a fancy way of saying "Digital Art major." My emphasis is in Game Design.

Jackie Watson, my partner in this project, is a Biomedical Art major. She goes to the cadaver lab every week and draws dead peoples' insides, among other less gory things. She is also interested in digital art, and decided to take a T.I.M.E. elective in which I am also enrolled: Media Integration & Interactivity, which is a fancy way of saying "Interactive Web Art."

The assignment for this class is this: Team up with other people to plan and create an interactive web piece that reflects a semester's worth of research, planning, and production.

Jackie and I went through a couple different ideas, one being a subversive, glitchy website about a hoax medical conspiracy or another site offering in-depth tutorials about self-surgery. However, we settled on a more serious, but no less playful, idea:

We will be applying the scientific concepts of genetics and evolution to digital, interactive art.

Yes, this has been done before, varying from pictures evolved by the user to dancers that learn new moves by natural selection. We feel, however, that we may be able to bring something different and interesting to the web, along with documenting our process so that others interested might be able to follow all of this relatively complex theory and programming. After all, both of us are relative newbies at programming, and all of this genetic algorithm stuff is new to me. So you, lucky reader, get all of our hard-earned knowledge about how to make sense of it all for free.

That is, if we manage to figure any of it out at all.

We'll be programming in a language called Processing, designed specifically with artists and other creative people in mind. It's open source and free to download; it's definitely worth checking out if you have any interest in making programmed art.

I'll be posting updates on our progress, as well as providing links to all of our sources in the "Resources" box to the right.