The animator's survival kit

Richard Williams, animation director for Who framed Roger Rabbit, wrote and drew this book. A great resource for 2D animation of people and animals. A lot of walkcycles, jumpcycles and good descriptions of how old school drawing animation was made.

First playable test of Golem game

In the following link you can run a playable first testversion of the Golem Game. It's very rough with no backgrounds or sound and it's only the first room of long adventure. The task is to get the key from the cat, unlock the door and leave the room. I doesn't look like much but a lot of the essential features and object's are included, like the movement of Golem, attacking, an inventoryobject, a creatureobject (the cat), destroyable objects, climbing of ladders and more. These objects will be reused in the following programming. What is left to come of the main functions is a conversation system with people, saving game and Golem charachteristics depending on how the player chooses to play the game. Good or Evil? Even in this first test version there is a good way of solving the puzzle and an evil way. Catlovers be warned.

Use this link to try a webversion of the game.
http://web.comhem.se/linusersson/golemGameHtml/

Terminator Golem

Last week I saw the Terminator movies with my son and now I found the real thing. The Cyberdyne systems of the movies are in real life called - The Golem Project.

The GOLEM project for artificial life

This is an interesting project by two american professors in Artificial Intelligence AI. As I understand it they've made a lifelike robotic system (computer program?) that designs robots by itself. I'm not sure though whether the designs that are made in the program also are produced in real life. The images show both computer 3d models but also some real 3d models. There also seems to be a downloadable screensaver program you can run on your own computer that have this AI intelligence and that designs these robots while you're inactive on your computer. It also said that this program can communicate with other Golem Project screensavers and exchange structures.

 "In the Golem project (Genetically Organized Lifelike Electro Mechanics) we conducted a set of experiments in which simple electro-mechanical systems evolved from scratch to yield physical locomoting machines. Like biological lifeforms whose structure and function exploit the behaviors afforded by their own chemical and mechanical medium, our evolved creatures take advantage of the nature of their own medium - thermoplastic, motors, and artificial neurons. We thus achieve autonomy of design and construction using evolution in a limited universe physical simulation, coupled to off-the-shelf rapid manufacturing technology. This is the first time robots have been robotically designed and robotically fabricated. "

These are the guys behind it.
Jordan Pollack and Hod Lipson

Retard doll (CP-Dockan)

Last week, a swedish group called Gothenburg Cooperative for Independent Living (Göteborgskooperativet för independent living – GIL), planted a 'Retard doll' into toy stores in Gothenburg. The group is a non profit organisation which provides personal assistants to people with disabilities. The doll is meant to draw attention to how we treat people with disabilities. It is made to appear as if it has cerebral palsy and is not meant to be "cute" at all. "


I think it's an interesting project and a great initiative. I'm not sure though what they mean with the message written on the packaging  "Treat her like a real retard". Probably they want to make you aware that you treat 'retards' differently than others, but why encourage that by saying that you actually 'shall' treat her like a retard. Even if this is said in an ironic way, the message should be that we shouldn't treat her any different than any other person. This way, it sounds like someone could misunderstand this totally, and take this doll as a freak to mock and to be laughed at. I think the impact would have been stronger if the package resembled the package of any doll, maybe not even clearly saying it is a retard doll. 


"She doesn't swear, have sex, drink, or poop. So much better than a normal retard." I don't fully understand this qoute either. Why should she drink and have sex? She is a baby, right? Not  a teenager! Are they ironic again, saying that people think retards swear, have sex, drink and poop more than others. People have prejudices, but I'm not sure these are the ones they have for retards. Or is it that they want to point at the stupidness of thinking such things against anyone. If so, it is a bit unclear to me. I think it should be fun if she peed like the dolls we saw in TV-advertisments a while ago. You give her water and after a while it comes out the natural way. Interesting in itself as a phenomenon which focuses on the 'motherly' caring of the child the doll shall represent. If the retard doll pees like this doll, I think it triggers more complex and dualistic feelings. Making a point that retards pee the same way as anybody else, but also might trigger  a strange feeling of guilt that you think a retards pee is ickier tha a normal childs.


In the context of my Golem-game, this doll is a Golem which adressess some of the issues I want to adress with my game. The way we look at and treat people that are different from ourselves. The misfits in our world.


Aftonbladet 120524 (Swedish)
CP-dockan at Facebook
Nothing to do with Arbroath, Blogarticle 120528 (English)

GameMaker Studio - Release

A new version of GameMaker is finally released. I've participated in the betatest and so far I'm very pleased with the program. You can easily and fast make games without having much knowledge of programming, but you you have also the built in gml language, similar to C#, with which you
can take the gamemaking further on an advanced level. Together with my 10 year old son, I've made a Mickey Mouse game with sprites from spriters-resource.com. Together we've made almost 40 platform levels and my son builds his his own using preprogrammed objects, backgrounds and tiles. When it comes to the Golem game though, it takes some time when you want to polish the game to a professional level. You really have to understand the generated events well and much of the debugging seems to be about events trigging eachother. It could get complicated when you have dived to deep in parent-child relations of objects which could result in difficulties finding which object and event triggered a certain action.
The most important feature in this new version is for me though the ability to export directly to iOS and iPhone. I haven't tried it yet but when I do, I hope I can release testversions for you people out there to run on your mobile phones.

GameMaker website - www.yoyogames.com

White Hills

Game soundtrack of my dreams - anything by White Hills. A bit difficult, though, to create something like this in Rockband for iphone. I'm posting it as an inspiration of my work with the game. Beautiful, hypnotic and metal at the samt time.

Instructions on how to make a Golem

Creating the golem from clay will take several hours. Be sure to start early in the day.

According to legend, there are an almost infinite variety of ways to create a golem. They can basically be categorized into two forms. One method is to construct the golem from clay and put some kind of inscription on or in the statue.

To make a Golem from clay:
・ writing instrument
・ pure white robes
・ purified clay
・ purified dust
・ purified water
・ purity of purpose

Read the instructions

FAQ