Sunday, January 31, 2021

Genuary 2021 Day 31: "Oblique Strategies"

 


I like the idea of Brian Eno's cards for jarring your brain to be more creative, to get out of its rut. I found an online Eno Oblique Strategy oracle, and it told me:

"Don't be afraid of things because they're easy to do."

Which I played around with for a while. I remembered the old vector arcade Star Wars game that allowed you to select your level and get a bonus if you selected anything but the easiest difficulty. But no shame in playing on "easy". Some people prefer to experience the story.



So, I rendered my own version of the level selection screen, using my ray marcher. I added in some "reflection" operators, so the four X-Wing cannons are actually a single piece of geometry. The 3 Death Stars are, in fact, 3 separate items in the scene hierarchy.

I then rendered a starfield as 4 separate Bridson blue noise pointsets. I drew the different pointsets with different colors - I think this gives some satisfying clustering, and looks like a SF vision of how stars look, even if it's not realistic.

I then used my Hershey Font renderer to draw some text. I put in the Eno prompt to give the player some reassurance.

I composited the starfield, the rendered scene, and the text together in GIMP.

Tools Used: drawSVG, my ray marcher, GIMP, Hershey Futura L font

Languages Used: Python

Development Time: ~3 hours

Drawing Time: ~1.5 hours (for the rendered bits, negligible for the rest)

What's Generative Here: only the starfield. Everything else was done by hand.

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