Category Archives: Releases

MOUNTAIN

Releases, Video Games

Hi! Here is a thing I spent the last couple months working on with super cool dude David OReilly:

MOUNTAIN is an ambient procedural mountain simulator. It generates a virtual mountain based on drawn responses to three questions. From that point on the only interaction you have with the mountain is to move the the camera around and play little tunes on a keyboard.

MOUNTAIN has received excellent coverage in The Atlantic, Wired, Gamasutra, and LA Weekly, among others.

MOUNTAIN costs only $1 and is available for iOS as well as for Mac, Windows, and Linux via the MOUNTAIN website.

Spectral Harp Out Now For iOS

Apps, iOS, Minim, openFrameworks, Releases

Image showing the Spectral Harp app.

Spectral Harp is now available on the iOS App Store for just $0.99!

Spectral Harp is a sound toy that generates sound by letting you strum or tap strings that represent portions of the audible spectrum. You can produce more variations in sound by using the four sliders along the bottom to control spectrum density, pitch, decay, and a bit crush effect. It’s great for creating things that sound like aliens or droids talking. Here’s a sound sample:

Cosmic DJ Released In Special Humble Bundle!

Releases, Unity3D, Video Games

Wow! So Excite! The music game I’ve been working on for the past two years with my buds Eric and Matt over at GL33k is now available for Windows and Mac through the Devolver Digital Double Debut Humble Bundle! This is pay-what-you-want bundle of games and movies. You can also choose to put some of your payment towards Brandon Boyer’s Cancer Treatment Relief Fund. He’s a super awesome dude that has been instrumental in bringing indie games the attention and respect they deserve and has been straight up stiffed by his insurance company because they are invoking a super dicey pre-existing condition decision.

What’s Cosmic DJ, you may be wondering? It’s a crazy cool music game where you can sequence up to five instruments over backing tracks and then the game will remix all of your sequences into a song you can share with your friends. In other words, it’s a super fun way for non-musicians and musicians alike to make music! Here, maybe watching our trailer will explain it better:

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You can also make cover art for your songs right in the game while you wait for the song to be recorded. Here’s a track I made recently:

And there’s more to come: we will be releasing Cosmic DJ for iOS in the near future and hopefully bringing the game to Steam as well. I’ve also got a couple technical blog posts lined up about some of the stickier issues we encountered while preparing the desktop release.

You can keep tabs on Cosmic DJ through Facebook and Twitter. Tell your friends!

Minim 2.2.0 Released

Minim, Processing, Releases

The day has arrived. It has (for me) taken an excruciatingly long time to arrive, but here it is.

I have finally released a new version of Minim.

It is essentially not much different from the 2.1.0 Beta release that many of you are familiar with and which has been included with Processing for about a year. But the documentation is now in a state that I don’t feel totally embarrassed about and that will be easier to maintain moving forward. The Minim Manual is no more (and I apologize for all the links out there on the web that will break as a result), but it just doesn’t make sense to try to maintain two sets of documentation. The point of the Manual was to give new programmers documentation that was more approachable than bare Javadocs and I think the new documentation site, generated with my hacked version of the popular proDOC, accomplishes that goal. I’ve also kept and updated the Quickstart Guide for those people who really don’t want to read very much before getting their hands wet.

I’ve initiated a pull request with the Processing team on Github, so I think you can expect to see this version of Minim included with the next release of Processing, though I can’t say exactly when that will be.

Moving forward I hope to be able to have more regular releases with bug fixes and so forth. If you experience bugs or find a hole in the documentation that you really wish could be filled, please open an Issue on Github and let me know about it!

STARPHONIX:
A #GAMEMAKINGFRENZY Game

Releases, Unity3D, Video Games

I just spent basically my entire weekend working on a game for #GAMEMAKINGFRENZY, the Fantastic Arcade 48-hour game jam. The theme was Intergalactic Fantastic with the additional restriction of No Humans Allowed. I collaborated with George Royer from White Whale Games to create a game about the STARPHONIX series probes, which were sent out to negotiate peace treaties with alien probes to prevent the destruction of planets of interest.

You can play it in your browser, download it for Windows, or download it for Mac.

Portraying The Terran Condition: An Approach To Simulate A Civilization

Releases, Unity3D, Video Games

I am currently the artist-in-residence for monochrom at the Museumsquartier in Vienna, Austria. Gotta say, hanging out in an old European city thinking about art is pretty sweet. As part of the residency, I decided to participate in Fuck This Jam, which is a week-long game jam with the theme of “making a game in a genre you hate.” So, in collaboration with Johannes Grenzfurthner from monochrom, I created a First Person Research Shooter called Portraying The Terran Condition: An Approach To Simulate A Civilization.

Portraying The Terran Condition is a 7D (backwards compatible to 2D) world simulation which depicts six different key events in the history of Terra (“Earth”), a low-tech civilization that self-destructed several aeons ago. Based on the relatively few biological and cultural artifacts, a team of multi-AI minds was able to recreate a stunningly accurate depiction of this ancient civilization.

The game is available for Windows and Mac.

Additional thanks are due to Eric Wenske, my teammate from Cosmic DJ, who made a couple models, and to Heather Kelley, fellow Kokoromi member, whose wise words led me to do procedural level generation for the game. So, I guess it’s also a rogue-like!

Controlling a Meeblip from Reaper with a JS effect

Releases, , , ,

I recently purchased a Meeblip because I wanted a project to work on with my maker friends that I get together with every week. I decided to buy the full build-it-yourself kit, which meant I was in for a fair amount of soldering and so forth. Anyway, that all finally came together and I plugged it into my computer to see if I could control it with a MIDI track in Reaper. Yup! You sure can!

However, what you can’t do is create an envelope for any old MIDI CC message. You can put CC messages into the MIDI clips themselves, but that’s not very conducive to doing the kind of automation I’m used to doing with bass synth VSTs. It turns out that Reaper comes with a JS effect called MIDI_CCRider, which allows you to put an LFO on any CC message you want. I was able to look up which CC message was filter cutoff for the Meeblip and automate it using that effect. But this was not great because it meant that I’d need an instance of the effect for every parameter I wanted to control and that I’d have to constantly remind myself which CC messages controlled which parameters of the synth. So, instead, I decided to use that effect as the basis for a new JS effect that would have all that information baked into it and simply give me a bunch of sliders and combo boxes labeled the same as on the Meeblip. And voila:

The effect only sends a CC message when the value of a slider changes. This means that you can use it to set some initial values and then play with the knobs on the Meeblip while you loop a bassline. Only parameters of the effect that you choose to automate with an envelope will be constantly overridden. If you’d like to try it out with your Meeblip, you can grab it from Github: https://gist.github.com/3606021

WaveShaper Update and Sale!

Releases, WaveShaper

Another bug-fix update will be going out on the store later tonight or tomorrow and to celebrate I’m dropping the price to $1.99 for one day. If you’ve been reluctant to spend the full $6 on it, grab it on January 28th!

Also coming reasonably soon will be version 2.0, which will include Dropbox integration and Audio Copy/Paste.