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Dark Maze
I decided to use a weird tool for ludum dare this time: Mathematica. I wanted to try to a game that used dynamically generated sounds because usually I never do anything with sound. Mathematica is definitely a little weird for building an interactive application, but it gave me easy sound generation, and 3D rendering in a nice interactive development environment. It was almost kind of Lisp-y. I did find a fantastic reference for how to do interactive game programming in Mathematica taught at Rice University with a lot of examples here. Here’s an example of what playing with sounds looks like in Mathematica.
I thought I might try to do my entry Dark Maze using sound exclusively (requires free Mathematica 7 Player to play). I wasn’t the only one with the sound exclusive idea. The entry Soundscape goes in a similar direction. I ended up having some visual elements for the game. For instance, you can see yourself and the balls you throw by default, and you can also “cheat” to see the whole environment, at which point the exercise of navigating becomes trivial. I’d still like to see if it’s possible to do an audio-only form of maze navigation. Perhaps if the audio simulation were good enough to capture things like echos, or maybe it would just have to do something very artificial like different tones for different things.
I’ve included my timelapse as an embedded thing, but it’ll take a little while for the admins to make it work. Until then, here’s a link to it.
