an open-ended game of rocks and sand, and/or a simulator for compudanzas
the sandy space contains a bunch of rocks in either one of two possible colors, and yourself.
push and arrange the rocks to prototype and build your own computer, cellular automata, 1-bit art, etc.
what will you do with the sand?
about
darena was developed as an exercise to learn about uxn
uxn virtual machine and assembly language
on one hand, this happened as part of the s-camino practice.
on the other, this was thought as a potencial simulator of computational performances.
you can play with it in the web, thanks to the webuxn port by aduros:
features
- a character that moves in all four cardinal directions
- rocks that can be pushed around, unless they are colliding with other rocks or the borders of the "arena"
- a toggling station where rocks can be switched to the other color
- realistic animation: the character slows down when pushing rocks, recovering their original speed when walking
controls
use the arrow keys for cartesian movement within the space
possible "improvements"
- add an "official" pulling option (you can pull rocks right now, but in a hacky way)
- save rocks state (position and color) to file
- optimize the use of memory for rock colors, using one bit per rock instead of one byte
- optimize for 256x192 screensize
the code
this iteration has 31 rocks and a single toggling station where one can switch their color/state.
you can find the code in the uxnería