everything changes when you cross the threshold

This is without a doubt the most minimal here and then gone to date. I was wondering what it would look like if you tried to make a game that is a single sentence, and this is the result.

My other big ongoing project is an attempt to flatten the typical hierarchy between game designer and player, and I think this is maybe leaning on my work there. I think a game that is a single sentence probably requires its players to bring something of themselves to the table, to flesh out the game and make it complete and real.

the quiet in the garden

Another postcard game this month, this time a wee solo boardgame. Hopefully the rules on the postcard cover everything you need to know, but if anything's unclear just go with whatever makes the most sense to you.

Download the quiet in the garden

The Rules:

looking for a world

As I wrote last month, I had less time to spend on here and then gone, so instead of something digital, I made a tiny postcard game.

I don't know where it came from, but I had this phrase "I am looking for a world" stuck in my head, so I spun a game out of it. I guess it's a kind of solo journalling game, designed to fit on a postcard. An attempt at writing a gamepoem, or game design as poetry.

Download looking for a world

the best of wishes

This month I finally got round to replacing the clunky sprite-based text rendering system I'd been using in my game engine with a more modern SDF solution. If you're not familiar with Signed Distance Fields, this basically means I can render text without worrying about blurry or jagged glyphs.

This month's piece is just an excuse for me to put the new system through its paces. It's a procedural game rules generator, with each rule animated onto the screen in sequence. The rules are just a Tracery grammar in the poem.json file if you want to take a look or edit them.

Download the best of wishes

this luminous shoal

This month I wanted to see what would happen if I overlaid 3 games on top of each other. I didn't have as much time to work on it as I wanted, so it's really just a disjointed, disconnected mess of a thing. Enjoy!

Also, I spent some time this month refactoring my game engine. I paid off some of the long-standing technical debt and moved the libraries I rely on into a 'third-party' directory. This means that, in the unlikely event that you want to take one of these here and then gone projects and mod it, that should be a lot easier now. Everything you need will be in the zip file; just open the solution in Visual Studio (it does mean that the downloads will be bigger than before, as I'm including all the necessary libraries).

falling into the world

An audiovisual musical instrument inspired by the hurdy-gurdy and the LED rings we've been using for a current Biome Collective project. Keep the mouse moving to keep the drone going, and touch the points at the side to trigger notes.

Download falling into the world

Controls: escape: quit; mouse: play the instrument; -: minor key; +:major key; zsxdcvgbhnjm,: set root note

the weight of stars

This month’s piece is a bit different; rather than the usual Windows executable, I’ve returned to my roots and created a VST audio plugin.

To use it you will need a Windows VST3 plugin host, but that includes basically any modern DAW (I use Reaper myself).

There are a handful of presets to demonstrate how to use it, but if you’d like the low level/technical explanation, here goes:

ghost waters sing

An interactive poem. Click any letter and it will randomise the word around it, while keeping the selected letter the same.

I created the initial text by starting with a word and then coming up with a word that felt like it fit after it (and repeating that process), giving no thought to meaning. The only constraints I gave myself were no words longer than 6 letters, and each line had to be the same length in a monospace font. The final thing ended up significantly darker than I was expecting, but it's interactive, so you can change that.

Download ghost waters sing

the light rushes in

I mentioned droqen’s awake last month; this month’s piece is a direct riff on that game. I also drew a wee bit on sylvie’s approach to platformer mechanics.

I mentioned last month that I completely misinterpreted the point of awake: I thought the point was to get to the lightswitch and just experience the cool ambient swell that plays when you turn the lights off. When actually the point is to make your way back up to the start in the dark.

the light rushes in is an attempt to make the game that I thought awake was. There’s no way to get back to the start once the lights are out; in fact, there’s no jump mechanic at all.

behind the screen

Experimental procedure:

Subject is to be observed once a day. Camera may be activated for 4 seconds only; while active a single frame may be captured and saved to disk. Daily observations must be recorded in the observation log.

drawn in the gaps

I had very little time for fun things this month, so this month’s piece is a very simple colour-tracking webcam toy. You can select a pixel from your webcam and the shader will then fill in all pixels of a similar colour with a colour of your choice. And you can play with some of the parameters for different effects.

I had plans to implement fancy fire effects in the shader, but I ran out of time, so it’s just a very simple toy that you can play with.

Download drawn in the gaps

something in the distance

A deterministic exploration game. There are 4 gems and 1 exit. To leave collect all 4 gems then walk through the exit.

Rooms are connected deterministically, but not in the usual way. A room may have different exits determined by how you enter it. In order to reach the exit you'll need to figure out the specific logic by which rooms are connected.

Download something in the distance

every long-awaited pause

I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of feather-collaging photos together. This month’s piece is fairly simple: draw with the mouse to blend photos and field recordings together. You can swap out or add your own photos/sounds to the photos and sounds folders if that’s a thing that is interesting to you.

Download every long-awaited pause

Controls: escape: quit; mouse drag: blend photos/field recordings

while starlings wait

A very simple Autumn sketch, inspired by the background of this Sloane Leong piece. Move the mouse to drop some leaves, left and right mouse buttons move the leaves. All accompanied by some sounds I recorded in my back garden.

Download while starlings wait

Controls: escape: quit; mouse move: drop leaves; left mouse: spin leaves; right mouse: push leaves

strange harvest

I didn’t have much time this month, so I got some markers, drew something, and built a light treasure hunt around it. Find all the diamonds to reveal the whole picture.

Download strange harvest

Controls: escape: quit; cursor keys: move focus

make sure you’re back for dinner

I like walking simulators, but the term ‘walking simulator’ is a pretty poor description of the games in that genre. Which is understandable, given that it was originally coined as a derogatory term by people who have clearly never gone walking in their lives.

This month I thought I’d have a go at making a game that takes the term at face value, and simulates a specific element of real world walking: the game of deciding when to turn back in order to catch the last bus home.

something unseen

I didn't have much time this month, so this is a very simple one. A series of 1-bit images, with some basic physics applied to each black pixel so that you can drag your mouse across the image, collecting pixels as you go. When you let go of the mouse the pixels morph into a new, randomly-selected image.

I would have recorded a video, but the colours and the nature of the pixel motion means it gets absolutely destroyed by video compression. If you're not on Windows, or you're reading this at some point in the future, you'll just have to imagine what it looks like.

this is not a story of escape

This month I made something filled with all my despair about the future present, together with the strange wonder of watching the plants in my garden and greenhouse scrambling over each other, flowering and fruiting. To be honest I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to spend part of the month listing all my fears and sourcing images of all the worst people on the planet for it, but, well, here we are.

There is more than enough despair going round at the moment and you definitely don’t need me adding to it, so feel free to skip this one. If you do decide to play it, I will say that it’s very short, oblique, and there are flashing images.

Download this is not a story of escape

in hungry palaces

This month's piece is a simple high score game. There are 10 targets; score points by stopping as close to their centre as possible.

I really just wanted to make something that would let you draw a mix of satisfying looping curves, and right-angle curves. There's not much to it beyond that to be honest.

Download in hungry palaces

bright embers

This month, a game that’s all about bouncing balls off things. It maybe shares a lineage with arpeggiate the world in that it’s a single-screen arcade game without the scoring, timers and leaderboards so often associated with arcade games. Has anyone coined the term ‘post-arcade game’ yet? Can I claim it for these games?

I wanted all the audio to revolve around the (super-minimal, admittedly) music, so the SFX are actually generated by a custom granulator effect that takes the main synth chords as its input. For every collision or ball death, I trigger a single grain from the granulator, pitched up by octaves or fifths (as an aside, I think this is my first game using just intonation). To avoid triggering a silent or very quiet grain, there’s a threshold parameter so that we only write into the granulator’s buffer if the input’s loud enough. I’ve not come across a granulator like this before; I was pretty happy with how well it worked.

The nice thing about all this is that the soundscape scales really nicely, all the way from distinct individual collisions when the game’s quite calm, to the classic granular full-on wash of sound when it’s all kicking off. Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how my background as an audio programmer shapes the way I design games in specific ways. This feels like a good example of that. i.e. the SFX are connected to both the mechanical action on screen and the music, which is itself tied to the visuals with that chord-synced wipe effect. I don’t know if you’d get these kind of specific close couplings from a designer who isn’t also an audio programmer?

cymbal island

For last month's arpeggiate the world, I wanted all the audio to be procedural (no samples), but I realised I didn't have any code for a decent-sounding cymbal. So I took a bit of a detour from the main game and coded a cymbal synthesizer for it, following these old Sound On Sound articles. Having coded it though, there wasn't much time to actually explore it before I had to upload the game.

So this month's piece is a more thorough exploration of that cymbal synthesizer. It's a pixel art island which you can populate with robots and arrows. Robots will travel in one direction until they either hit an arrow or fall into the sea. Any time a robot hits an arrow or falls into the sea, it will trigger one of 5 cymbal synthesizers.

Content warning: This one has a lot of flashing colours!

So I was thinking about arcade games, and how they're almost always focused on numbers, whether that's high scores or timers. And I was wondering what an arcade game would look like where the goal wasn't to get the high score, or set the fastest time.

So arpeggiate the world is an avoid-em-up arcade game where the goal is just to keep the music going. With an arpeggiating synth as the main instrument, you collect pickups which each add an element to the music (an extra octave for the arpeggiator, percussion, effects, etc.), and orbit around you when collected. If an orbiting pickup collides with one of the enemies, you lose it (and that music element). If you lose all your orbiters the music stops and the game is over.

I’m not religious, but if I were, my religion would be Bed. The core tenets of my faith would be:

• Bed is sacred

• Sleep is worship

• We have no need of cathedrals, synagogues, or mosques; our Beds are our cathedrals

• Winter is hibernation time, the most sacred time of year; the most devout of us spend all Winter in Bed

• Waking up, disturbing, or harming someone who is in Bed is an unforgivable sin, punishment for which is permanent exile to The Sleepless Lands (mine would be an unforgiving god)

Anyway, this month I made a card game about trying to get a good night’s sleep.

Download sleep well

a tangled land

Via this tweet by @webbedspace, this month I found myself watching a couple of streamers play through this absolutely wild Mario 64 romhack (streamed in 3 parts by spaghoner and videochess: part 1, part 2, part 3). If you take a look at this incomplete (and not entirely correct?) map of the game that they were trying to navigate by, you can maybe get a sense for why I was so taken by it. The way the hack turns the game inside out and duplicates rooms and hubs and has the player continually stumbling across new spaces that loop back to old spaces is just... It feels like someone binged Mario 64 over a couple of days, had intense, nonsensical dreams about it as a result, then turned those dreams into a romhack. I love it.

So there's no way I was going to create a vast, elaborate 3D platformer in the space of a week or so, but I thought I could maybe lean on that confusing, tangled map to create something with a similar sense of discovery and interconnection, hence a tangled land. It's far from the prettiest thing I've made, but if you play it it'll quickly become clear that the bulk of my time was spent on other parts of the game.

It's basically a map for you to uncover. You can travel between places using the number keys (usually; there are occasional exceptions to that rule). If you hit a number key that connects to another place, both the connection and that place will be revealed. And there are secrets.

This month’s piece was born out of me reading Sean Costello’s reverb design posts over at Valhalla DSP (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). I’ve been coding audio effects for 20(!?) years, and I’ve always avoided coding reverbs because I’d read that they’re complicated and require a lot of fiddly tuning. And when I had tried to look into reverb design it was always presented in a way that seemed to confirm that impression.

But Sean’s posts (in addition to the explanation on this dated-looking semiconductor site, which Sean links to in Part 3) explained things in a way that makes it clear that reverb design doesn’t need to be complicated. It really just revolves around 2 basic building blocks: an all-pass filter and a delay. Turns out, creating a nice reverb is just about connecting a bunch of all-passes and delays together, and modulating the delay times to avoid that nasty metallic sound you get with bad reverbs. Here’s a scrawled diagram of the design I came up with (the various numbers are pretty arbitrary; you can easily create a different-sounding reverb by choosing different numbers)

(this was also the first time I saw someone explain what an all-pass filter actually is in non-maths terms. It’s literally just a delay that has a feedforward signal as well as a feedback signal)

Anyway, I made this thing. You can either play it as an instrument (see the readme for the full controls), or just leave it running as a super minimal, hypnotic generative piece.

the words notwithstanding

I think we're back!?

the words notwithstanding is a text-based drawing tool/musical instrument that writes out the text of Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth as long as the mouse button is held down. It switches colour and pitch for every sentence, which has the neat consequence of visualising the sheer length of Kirk's sentences.

Telemaphoneroo

I’m still not back to regular here and then gone times yet, but I do have something cool to share. Telemaphoneroo is an online telephone game inspired by: playing with Biome folk and my colleagues at Abertay, and my tendency to narrate what I’m doing when I’m cooking, adding in random extra syllables to the words (so fork becomes forkalork; spoon, spoonaloon).

We're not back to normal yet for this newsletter, but I did make a game this month, for the launch jam of candle's bitsy clone . bipsi appealed because - among other additions to the bitsy formula - it lets you plug in your own javascript code in the editor. Which let me plug in some webaudio text-to-speech and synthesis code.

still on hiatus, sorry!

I moved house last week, so here and then gone is very much still on hiatus. Here’s some links though:

Further Reading

A tale of death and grief and a by G.V. Anderson.

…on hiatus…

Well, I’ve finally hit a month where I just have no time to make something for here and then gone. There’s too much happening right now, and I’m writing this a week in advance because I’ll have no time to write it next week.

I said last month that the next few here and then gones were probably going to be quite pared-back, and true to my word this is probably the most pared-back thing I've made for this project to date. It's not even a piece of software! Just a wee 4 page pdf.

I was struggling a bit to come up with feasible ideas this month, so I decided to just write down some observations about my dreams. I don't know if this is true for other people, but I'm pretty sure all my dreams take place in the same landscape. That is, I have travelled to locations in one dream that I previously visited in another.

I don't know what other people's dreams are like, but the interconnectedness of my dreams has always seemed weird to me, so I decided to try and document some of the places I've visited when dreaming.

This month is a fairly simple one; each (real world) day you run it will give you a different image, with a procedurally generated title, all accompanied by a generative drone. For the titles I went back through all the names I’ve given previous here and then gone pieces and created a tracery grammar that tries to replicate some of the patterns in the way that I’ve been naming these.

In which I narrate a daydream of an alternative highlands, drawing on a BBC adaptation of one of Alan Garner’s lesser works from my childhood, the , , and strange concrete structures emerging out of the rainforest.