Lina and I have begun work on the next iteration of Germination X which will be more playable than the demos we’ve been working on up till now. We are developing the look and building some of the underlying technology we need for the Pixelache event in March, lots more of this to come, but I’ve begun using the Lirec wiki to start to organise and document things.
The first part I’m looking at is getting characters drawn on paper into a multiplayer game instantly using various computer vision algorithms. This will be used in of one of our workshops at Pixelache, but we also want to prototype characters quickly and easily ourselves. Something which was lacking with the first groworld games, and I tried to address during Naked on Pluto was the effectiveness of making games shapeable by everyone involved in a project. Programming time and effort spent on this kind of accessibility seems to buy you a lot more time throughout a project even if it’s not actually seen or used by players in the end.
