Thanks for visiting and taking an interest. I will try to keep these links alive for a while yet, so they don’t simply disappear off the face of the internet.

The game was inspired by (and features) So Twenty One by Sleepy Town Manufacture. This song is a free download on archive.org, but I also got permission from the creator to make the game. The idea was to have a short, interactive experience in time with music. There is a challenge involved (you can lose) but it was meant to be something anyone could play through in one or two tries.

I’ve exported my old SVN-based code to git, and uploaded it to GitHub. I hope someone finds it informative  or even helpful.

• GitHub repo (check the readme file)
• Song download
• Compiled snapshot of the game (Windows)

Listening to some of the accounts reminded me of a game that I really enjoyed, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. I was in high school, and it must have been either 1999 or 2000. A friend from my class lent me a precious CD, holding a number of games that were … less than legitimate. This was before broadband internet was widespread, meaning the original game, which spanned (I believe) two whole CDs, had been stripped of its full-motion video cut-scenes and CD-quality music and compressed into a single .ZIP file.

Around that time, my parents had taken me to a Pat Metheny concert, when his trio visited Israel on tour. On the way out of the auditorium, we bought his album, Trio 99->00, which I still love today. This CD was in my computer’s optical drive a lot during this period, so while playing Jedi Knight, the familiar orchestral Star Wars background music was replaced with a modern American jazz trio. As I would explore the industrial factories and extra-terrestrial valleys, I might be accompanied by A Lot of Livin’ To Do or Capricorn.

There was a lot of mystery in the game, because I didn’t have those full-motion video cut-scenes to help tell me what was going on or what my objective was. I also used cheat codes because I was a huge sissy. Despite Jedi Knight being a first-person shooter, there was a third-person mode for when the light saber was used, in order to aid combat. I would use third-person as much as possible, because it was fun to control this character jumping around, waving a light saber. This resulted in me wandering around an empty level, looking for something to trigger the next level, listening to cool jazz and brandishing a light saber.

It’s hard to explain how calm and peaceful it was. To be sure, I was trying to get out of the level and move on to the next one. But the exploration had a special feel to it. Maybe some of this magic is rediscovered today in games like Proteus. And I think the Megastructure and its endless chambers may bring back other aspects.

EDIT: A video to help relive the experience!

Including tracks by:

• Sleepy Town Manufacture
• Global Communication
• Akufen
• Telefon Tel Aviv
• Charles Webster
• Juno Reactor
• … and more!!

Using Flickr’s new Gallery feature, I have put together a few megastructure explorations. These are built from other users’ photos, but represent a larger structure that crosses space and time to become the Megastructure we seek.

So far, there are three such explorations:

Exploration #1

Exploration #2 – Descent

Exploration #3 – Ascent

The feelings I get while going through these photos in their particular order is the same emotion the Megastrata simulation should give.

This is an ambitious project, one that I started years ago, with still very little progress achieved. However, by opening up the discussion and exposing the material I have gathered, I believe this deeply-founded subconscious realm can be expressed. Especially since now I am committed to blogging about it.

I’d like to begin by mentioning a few words about autogenerative-content, especially in how it differs from pre-generated and randomly-generated schemes.

Pre-generation implies that the objects or scenery was crafted and designed by a human artist, perhaps even down to the last detail. This method gives the artist quite a lot of freedom, but can hamper the potential world-size, because everything must be hand-made. Pre-generation is ideal for large companies with huge artistic and creative budgets.

On the other end of the spectrum, random-generation provides a surprising variety of content, as it relies on random numbers to generate events, characters, and even landscapes and scenery. However, depending on purely random occurences can be difficult to control and tune correctly. This method is widely used across the board, but rarely in creation of environments.

Procedural content bridges these two gaps by defining systems of random values that affect a pre-built framework. There is extensive work in this field, some of which has been aggregated here, at the Procedural Content Generation wiki. These higher-level functions can bring seemingly-natural content into a simulated world, while freeing artists from having to define every little detail.

Another benefit of using procedural methods is the repeatability factor. Given a certain seed, the random functions (actually pseudo-random) will generate the same values every time. If care is taken, an entire world may be predictably autogenerated, like a fractal that always is drawn the same way despite the countless layers of chaos within.

I believe that the Megastructure can be modeled, at least in parts, by using different blends of these techniques. Furthermore, an experience can be built that may span time and space, and link multiple users inside the endless corridors.