Archive for the ‘purity’ Category

Purity: IGF build, hiatus

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

The good news is, I managed to submit Purity for the IGF deadline at the beginning of this month. Download the (Windows) build here.

purity screenshot

Sadly, the day job is now ramping up such that I can’t really justify spending any more time on Purity until the big project ships, sometime next year. As it was, Purity limped in over the deadline at about an alpha level of completeness and polish. I’m proud that I was able to do that in the time I could spare, but it’s really more of a gesture at what I’d like the game to grow into than anything.

All the same, I’d love to hear what people think of the game in its current state.

Expressivity

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

The neighborhood where my wife and I live has a good mix of small town, forest and mountains within close proximity, and we like to go for nice long walks exploring it – we’re still relatively new to the area, and it’s decent exercise.

One of my many strange and obsessive pastimes is to, upon returning home, trace out the walk’s exact route in Google Earth. Here’s a zoomed out view of various excursions from March and April of this year:

walking routes

(I suppose if I had a few hundred dollars to spare, I could just buy a GPS to automate the process… hmm.)

Apart from a general interest in maps, exploration and the like, I think part of the enjoyment I get from this is that it visualizes a fairly subjective, semi-tangible experience in a way that has its own simple beauty. Each of the colored route lines are a fingerprint of our path through the world, and through life, on a specific date. It is a microexpression of individuality.

(more…)

Purity: on progress updates

Sunday, April 13th, 2008

I’m still mulling over how best to unveil Purity to the outside world. Right now I’m busy just getting the game to a limping state – it’s buggy, ugly and not much fun, but so are most games this early in development. So it may be a while before you see any screenshots or links to playable builds.

There are definitely some posts I want to make that explain and illustrate the ideas behind the game. They wouldn’t be essential to enjoying or “getting” it, they’d simply provide some context for people who care about things like the process and intent – the sort of thing for which I created this site, really.

On the other hand, I really don’t want to fall into that classic game development trap of promising big early on, speaking in tantalizing abstractions, only to disappoint with a mediocre or ineffectively communicative final result.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained?