Anthony Mattox Interaction Design + Digital Art

I’m excited to announce the launch of our new website here at Friends of The Web. We’re a web design studio just opening our doors here in Baltimore. We specialized in design and development on the web and on mobile devices. We’re especially interested in working with small local businesses and are open to any other interesting projects.

Check us out at FriendsofTheWeb.com, and don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!

Title screen for Orbit, a flash, arcade style, adventure game in space. Click to play!

Orbit is an arcade style adventure game. Explore an abandoned field of space junk and collect enough fuel to find your way home. The game is currently a small segment of the final adventure. In it I focused on developing the basic gameplay and the tone through motion, scale, graphics, and sound. Put on some headphones and give it a try.

Screenshots of the game. Click to enlarge.

In many ways, Orbit is quite similar to my first game, Pulsus. It’s just more circles and particles. But, while I’m certainly still show’s the same style and interests, I’ve added a few things to my game design vocabulary here. The biggest thing I tried to add was narrative and character. Although the story and goals are vague, I wanted to bring people into the game more with a bit of setting. I also tried to develop a sense of scale to the world.

Any feedback on the game is very much appreciated. This prototype is likely going to be expanded into an iOS game, with help from the rest of the Friends of The Web.

Various illustrations of space junk for a new game. Click the image to enlarge.

I’m working on a flash prototype for my next game, which will probably end up on iOS. Moving on from Pulsus, I’m designing something with a little more narrative, scenery, and character, although it’s still pretty much just particles…

Here’s a jumble of various pieces of space junk I’m working on for the game. It’s a fun process of designing little vector rockets and spaceships and then tearing them apart. I’m aiming to release a first prototype this weekend.

Generative Images created in Processing. Click to Enlarge.

I was recently asked to create some work for a collaborative project. I decided to create some generative work in Processing and try out some ideas I’ve had in the back of my mind. The script wraps a number of different generative patterns into one system. Each circle has instructions for how it behaves and creates new circles and these instructions change as they grow. The images it creates are more complex and dynamic that a lot of my preview sketches.

A slightly more technical explanation: The script has an array of objects, I’ll call them nodes. Each node has a couple of functions for initializing itself, branching new nodes, updating, and rendering. The container creates a new node which grows, branches, and then becomes inactive. The newly branched nodes grow and branch and the cycle continues, growing the image.

The fun part is that the basic ‘node’ object can be extended to any number of variations all of which can still be handled as the generic type by the container in the same way. The container tells a node to ‘branch’ and it may create new nodes randomly around itself or touching it’s sides or in a set direction to grow tendrils. Each variation of node also sometimes branches to different types so one structure will morph into another. Other functions, like rendering, can also be extended or overwritten to create different behavior.

I think there’s a lot of potential in this kind of polymorphic system. I’ll play around with it some more and maybe post some more technical examples.

I’ve spent the last four years at the Maryland Institute College of Art and recently graduated. I had a great experience at MICA. It’s sad to leave, but I’m ready to start something new as well.

Moving on I’m starting my own design studio, working on the web and other screen based platforms, with some good friends of mine. We’ve spent the last few weeks moving and setting up our new studio. We’re staying here in Baltimore and are excited to join the emerging tech community here. More on that will be coming soon.

Hopefully I’ll have a little more time for personal work now that school isn’t taking up every minute of my life. I have a new game in the works (hopefully with a flash prototype coming soon), as well as some updates to Pulsus. I’d like to blog more consistently, and have a little backlog of things to get that started. Maybe I’ll even have some time to work on some generative works and some sounds. We’ll see what keeps my interest.

I’m excited to be staying in Baltimore and to get back to work after a lot of reshuffling and resettling.