SoundSelf Jam, Part 1

SoundSelf currently has one audio-visual form (or "story", as we call it) - a tunnel of light with an orb in the center. Exploring this story has given us a lot of leverage to fine-tune the interactivity. But we want SoundSelf to contain many different stories and seamlessly move between them as you play.

I've spent the last week jamming on new ideas. Most of them are pretty uninteresting, but some have a lot of potential! Below are some of the first sketches that could be expanded into future stories.

I'll be live-streaming the rest of the jam this week! You can tune into my twitch.tv channel and click "follow" to be alerted when I start the broadcast. Don't be shy! I want to hear your voice! 

This form comes from creating an array of simple shapes, and have them constantly rush towards the player.
 

This is a radically different sort of visual form, and it's super elegant. By determining the particle's shape based on its location in x/y/z space, the center being zero (no variation), a blinking circle appears in the center. Totally accidental, but awesome emergent beauty like this is what makes these systems so powerful (more on that from Evan in a future blog post). This form could be expanded to feel like star systems, oceanic particles, or geometric forms like grids and spirals.

Normally, when I use the harmonograph the resolution (how many lines make up the curve) is like a ceiling limiting the complexity of the shape. Here, I've tried sharply reducing that ceiling, so changes in resolution itself have a dramatic impact on the shape. I don't necessarily see myself building a story around this, but knowing that adjusting resolution is itself an aesthetic tool is valuable.