Category: groworld

Bumper Crop released

A release of Bumper Crop is now up on the play store with the source code here. As I reported earlier this has been about converting a board game designed by farmers in rural India into a software version – partly to make it more easily accessible and partly to explore the possibilities and restrictions of the two mediums. It’s pretty much beta really still, as some of the cards behave differently to the board game version, and a few are not yet implemented – we need to work on that, but it is playable now, with 4 players at the same time.

Screenshot_2014-08-21-23-45-51

The 3D and animation is done using the fluxus engine on android, and the game is written in tinyscheme. Here’s a snippet of the code for one of the board locations, I’ve been experimenting with a very declarative style lately:

;; description of location that allows you to fertilise your crops
;; the player has a choice of wheat/onion or potatoes
(place 26 'fertilise '(wheat onion potato) 
  ;; this function takes a player and a 
  ;; selected choice and returns a new player
  (lambda (player choice)
    (if (player-has-item? player 'ox) ;; do we have an ox?
      ;; if so, a complete a free fertilise task if needed
      (if (player-check-crop-task player choice 'fertilise 0)
        (player-update-crop-task player choice 'fertilise)
        player)
      ;; otherwise it costs 100 Rs
      (if (player-check-crop-task player choice 'fertilise 100)
        (player-update-crop-task
          (player-add-money player -100) ;; remove money
            player choice 'fertilise)
          player)))
  (place-interface-crop)) ;; helper to make the interface

Testing the board game, which you can download on this page:

boardgame

The game on tablet:

Screenshot_2014-08-21-23-30-41

Screenshot_2014-08-21-23-40-04

This is the game running on a phone:

Screenshot_2014-08-22-10-25-54

Bumper Crop

Bumper crop is an android game I’ve just started working on with Dr Misha Myers as part of the Play to Grow project: “exploring and testing the use of computer games as a method of storytelling and learning to engage urban users in complexities of rural development, agricultural practices and issues facing farmers in India.”

Screenshot_2014-05-31-12-13-04

(Warning – contains machine translated Hindi!)

I’m currently working out the details with artist Saswat Mahapatra and Misha, who have been part of the team developing this game based on fieldwork in India working with farmers from different regions. They began by developing a board game, which allowed them to flexibly prototype ideas with lots of people without needing to worry about software related matters. This resulted in a great finished product, super art direction and loads of assets ready to use. I very much like this approach to games design.

From my perspective the project relates very closely to groworld games, germination x, as well as the more recent farm crap app. I’m attempting to capture the essence of the board game and restrict the necessary simplifications to a minimum. The main challenge now that the basics are working is providing an approximation of bartering and resource management between players that board games are so good at, into a simple interface – also with the provision of AI players.

Source code & Play store (very alpha at the moment!)

Building software for farmers

During the summer I’ve been working with the Swarm Knowledge Hub at Cornwall’s Duchy College. We’ve been building an android application that forms part of a scheme to highlight the value of organic fertilisers compared to costly and unsustainable synthetic fertilisers.

The core of the software is a calculator based on tables provided by DEFRA (the UK government’s Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs) which provides the quantities of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium nutrients provided by different types of manure spread on different types of soils.

1 2 3

Farmers are required to supply records of the fertiliser they use to DEFRA, so the program also allows you to input your fields and record the levels of nutrients spread on each one separately. You can then export the data as a csv file over email.

We are planning a workshop with local farmers in the coming weeks, which I’m really interested to be part of. To me this is an extension of the groworld project providing a connection to an additional, important group – the people who actually grow the food we eat.

The majority of the code was written in Scheme which meant a lot of it could be rapidly prototyped (I’ll be blogging more about this soon) and the source can be found on github here.

Aniziz and Zizim

The online part of the borrowed scenery project is an experiment in geotagging plants and plant related locations via a website/app called Zizim (the compass) combined with a multiplayer online game called Aniziz (the soil) where you can interact with the plants people have found. Having spent the last couple of months developing them, they are now ready for more of an open beta phase. Another part of the project is the forum here for collecting any feedback and thoughts.

Your role is to strengthen the connection between the world of Aniziz and the plants of Ghent. The plants are broadcasting messages which can only be correctly tuned into by energising them with fungi, the more plants you energise the higher your score will be.

The latest addition are specially tagged items called “pataportals” you can create with the android app which create “wormholes” in the Aniziz world. Stepping into one causes you to get sent to another one – which could be thousands of miles away. Right now Ghent is connected with the Cornish town of Penryn via a wormhole on the sea shore:

Aniziz on iPad

Thanks to HTML5 canvas, my first game that works on the iPad. All I had to do was hook up the touch events to call the mouse handlers and it was pretty functional, although the game would be better dealing with touch events differently using more drag-drop approach. The game runs around 20fps compared to 60fps on my laptop, but it’s fairly playable on Safari.

Borrowed Scenery

I spent last week working on various activities associated with the Electrified festival in Ghent, which included a mix of plant care, games dev, low level android audio hacking, beagleboard-bike fixing. Here are some photos of the Borrowed Scenery installation/physical narrative, home of the mysterious patabotanists and temporary research laboratory for FoAM – excellent for getting into the spirit of the work while developing it. More details in further posts.

Plasticine architecture

A patafungi building site for the Aniziz game. The shapes have been inspired by Siteless Рan architectural book I absolutely love by Fran̤ois Blanciak. It contains 1000 ideas for building forms inspired by time spent in different cities around the world. This could be a great starting point for all kinds of ideas for levels, worlds or objects in many types of games.

The forms, drawn freehand (to avoid software-specific shapes) but from a constant viewing angle, are presented twelve to a page, with no scale, order, or end to the series.