One of the next things to do for my diorama, and like the main thing to do, is build the characters. I've been debating different techniques and materials and knew I wanted to make use of my 3D printer to fabricate joints for their knees and elbows and hips and shoulders and wrists and necks and ankles and so on. They're basically really articulated actions figures, so I was looking around at the state of the art for this and found this model and just sent it to my printer without thinking too much about it. It was only going to take 90 minutes but I started it just before bed, kind of expecting something would go wrong because I haven't turned the printer on since October. I woke up to this:
Wow! This came right off the print bed like so, in two parts. I needed to snap the head onto the body but everything else was designed to be "print-in-place," meaning there's no assembly required there are some tiny tiny bits of plastic between the moving parts that are designed to break away the first time they're stressed, so after a satisfying series of pop-pop-pops you've just got a little guy. It reminds me of STIKFAS and the figure I had in high school that lived atop the hulking CRT monitor of the family computer.
Seeing how easy this was, I'm thinking I need to seriously think about how much functionality the printer can afford me for this project. I know I don't want any visible 3D-printed parts, but I ought to consider modeling and printing whole armatures for each figure. An alternative I had been considering is using rope or fabric for the joints, like a cloth doll or a marionette, and obviously that would still work, but this technique gives me something precise and repeatable, with a range of motion that is easier to control and limit in realistic ways.
The ratings for the Bigmode Game Jam have been revealed. Here's what people thought of Loose Leaf, my open world rhythm game walking simulator:
Very original, not very fun. Considering how long I struggled to land on a satisfying concept and how little time I left to develop that concept into a proper game, this feels very fair! I still want to revisit this game at some point and/or something like it, probably with real 3D graphics. But still programming it from scratch without and engine, that part was too much fun.
I spent more time thinking about my musical performance idea over the weekend and recorded a little song. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it represents a successful experiment in balancing composition and music-playing that I will try to explain forthwith:
I created seven tracks in Ableton Live each with at least two clips: one totally silent, then variations of a rhythm or melody, generally organized from more sparse to busier. Live's Clips are mutually exclusive within a track, so starting one will stop another one that's already playing. Playing a clip on a track doesn't affect clips playing on any other tracks, so different parts of a song can ebb and flow independently. Each clip was set to legato with no quantization, meaning that it can be triggered at any moment and launch immediately, but it'll stay in time with the previously-playing clip—triggering the clip on the third beat of a bar, for example, means the clip will start playing from the third beat of its first bar.
The final important part of this is using a Launchpad, which is a grid of buttons that correspond to the clips in Live. This way I can really quickly skip back and forth between clips on multiple tracks at the same time, writing a song from individual parts on the fly.
The next thing to try is composing these clips on the fly, while the song is playing, so I can transition from one "song" to another seamlessly without knowing what that second song will be until it begins. There are lots of different ways to approach this and I think the easiest option for me might require moving to hardware. I'm particularly thinking about how track mutes work on the Pyramid. (If you're thinking about my stage show and wondering how this applies, imagine that instead of a Launchpad button it's, I don't know, Chuck E. Cheese's nose.)
Yesterday I visited House of Kong, the Gorillaz immersive walkthrough. I was delighted by it; it felt really lush and expensive. The sets were great, and seeing how all the illustrated costumes and props from the Gorillaz universe translated to the real world was fun, but I think they overdid it with the headphones! The whole thing is on-rails and guests are guided from room to room by an apparatus not unlike what you might borrow for a museum audio tour. It sounded very good throughout, but more than any other critique I might have, I wanted more diegetic sound.
There's one really clever part where Murdoc is pacing behind us and we hear him talking but can't see him, because the lights went out but also because we're kneeling at an altar and physically can't turn around. There's a panning effect on the headphones track, and it works, but if his voice was from a speaker in the room—even from a speaker that was moving in the room, back and forth, maybe accompanied by a second speaker closer to the floor playing footsteps—it would have felt so much more real. Overall the experience really teases the idea that the members of the band are just out of sight at all times, but that idea often felt like it was being undercut by the technical choices, and it required a little more suspension of disbelief than I hoped.
Now that I think about it, I don't think there was a single moving effect in the whole thing. Lots of light cues and videos, and the sync was pretty perfect as far as I could tell, but no motorized props or anything. So what I'm suggesting would have been a huge departure, not to mention that speakers require soundproofing and most of the walls between rooms were just curtains, but what's my $49.50 for if not some precarious mechanical contraptions?
Another lasting effect of the show was the smell. I think maybe three of the scenes had a unique scent in them, and by the end they all kind of mixed together on my hair and skin and clothes into something I can only describe as haunted house. It made me nostalgic for Halloween Horror Nights and reminded me that I gotta get a ticket for Fan Fest Nights which is about a month away!
We're going to New York City, New York for one week starting Monday and have lots of theater lined up. Everything we've already booked is actually happening after next week's blog post so you'll hear about it in two weeks, but I will surely have already spent a day at The Met so I can tell you about that, maybe. The temperature in LA as I write this is 93°F; the temperature in NYC is 32°F. Uh oh!