Bouncy creatures are always fun. That’s where my brain went to first with this assignment. I had previously done a springy pigeon that was incredibly satisfying to play with so I had wondered could I build on that with Box2D?
(background SVG art not made for this assignment, pigeon remade in Matter.js soft bodies and then went with constraints)
Thoughts for physical device driven interactions — applying web events (device orientation and device motion) to the forces in the matter js engine.
But then I figured I had a week so I should take more time to think of more interesting inputs and outputs committing to something I already knew would have satisfying, albeit rather expected, interaction —
And what about an idea that I could build on later? Maybe the beginning of a series of things?
Or I should just think of it as which simulations do I want to do? Because the fluid simulation library looks so fun, but I haven’t figured out a narrative/interaction/input/output that is compelling and justifies it. But again, this is an exercise so maybe I should just do it because I want it.
…..a 5 days later….
Ok. So I turned the ideas around in my head and something just made me really happy thinking about a future where I make a collection of different games for different muscle groups. I imagined some future where the opponents in the exercise games were actually other users or your friends that you have challenged remotely, and then its like crowdsourcing human computation to generate new/unique emergent behavior for the opponents every time you play. Theres an app that plays zombie noises to make a regular jog feel like a chase, but that sort of gamification for motivation gets old pretty quickly. A concern I do have though is…well, aren’t wii games essentially games that made you move? But they fell out of favor…..hmm……….
….ok had an interesting conversation with Jacquar and Gray about why Wii felt gimmicky and eventually lost favor, vs. traditional minimal movement game controls and then touching on wii physical motion in games vs. motion in VR games. There’s an interesting dichotomy to analyze here. Will circle back on these thoughts after I make a MVP that doesn’t look like this:
Pigeon with Matter.js physics gone wrong from Marisa Lu on Vimeo.
So it started off with recreating physics with Matter.js, figured it would be simple enough to get a chain mechanism for the pigeon leg pinned to a particular location, and then! Then, it had an unexpectedly animate reaction that happens to self-sustain infinitely.
…..I wonder, does this ^ count as emergent behavior? The way a double pendulum movement might as a chaotic system.
So back to the an initial idea, a pigeon hanging precariously over an ocean of blood relying on the user jerking the ‘spring’ (their device) up to keep the poor bird out of the sharks jaws.
Bloodbath from Marisa Lu on Vimeo.
Later tied it to device orientation and any acceleration got converted into a ‘add force’ on the bodies in the Matter engine. (kinda, and then broke it while figuring out some browser issues but yay, if ya’ll ever need a full screen browser, I highly recommend BrowserMax)
feel free to try on a device browser, would recommend BrowserMax for fullscreen