In the past there has been some quoting of Chris Crawford, who relates it to a conversation. I find that to be a very helpful metaphor. Even your example of pressing a button and seeing a result isn't really interactive. It's just reactive.

So a deeper form of interactivity would involve two separate parties reacting to each other. It suggests more equal footing. That's why I think a conversation is such a useful concept.

Fascinating. So Marmoset is a game authoring tool?
Does anyone know any games created with it?

It's a custom C++ game engine developed by 8monkey Labs. That tool is the level design/scripting tool called Habitat; when I used it, it was fairly limited in features, being supported by our 2-person programming team and pretty focused on the game we were working on at the time, Darkest of Days. I think that's the only shipped title that's been developed with it. The model viewer Toolbag is used by the public at large, mostly by AAA game artists in the Polycount community.

Could you explain a little bit what this image represents? I'm not familiar with this engine.

The black boxes are invisible walls, the yellow ones are triggers that activate, with a customizable filter for any character, just the player, etc. Some of the brighter small squares are visual effects and triggering animations if I remember right. The darker magenta circles are logic nodes, so you can link that to a trigger that passes messages to other objects. I think an example would be to trigger a line of men to advance when a certain number of enemy men die; something like that.

But sometimes there's a lot of logic. And sometimes the object is just an empty object (and thus invisible). Logic that is primarily calculations, arrays, loops and conditions. An A.I. system would be an extreme example, or any sort of Finite State Machine.

But as I mentioned, perhaps elements of abstract logic could also be presented in the 3D space as objects that are not rendered in the game but only visible in the scene viewport (or you could simply put them on a layer that the game camera doesn't render). It might be very intuitive actually to manipulate logical "objects" in a similar way as actual 3D objects.

To prove his point about a lot of logic, here's two examples of some level design / scripting work I've done using visual logic nodes in the Marmoset engine. The first image shows logic for a battle with advancing lines of infantry, firing cannons, etc.

Looking forward to checking this out over the next couple weeks. Hope to give some feedback then

Awesome flickr, man!

This looks great, although too dark (except for the most recent image), and I love your procedural architecture renders as well. The former render geek in me is drooling.

I agree, you need to find a sound designer to partner with that has a taste as sophisticated as yours. Knowing the right direction to go should become a lot more clear once you find that partner and get some sound in there.

In terms of direction, I'd highly suggest you think about what it means to evoke a sense of being. What does it mean to be in that space? You'll want the sound to reflect that, as well as some parts of the world that make it feel alive (in the general sense of the word, I realize yours is highly synthetic).

Another suggestion would be to listen to what the design is "telling you." I know that's highly philosophical, but given your level of craftsmanship, it doesn't seem very fruitful to give super practical advice, heh.

Hmm...here's something more practical:
How can you apply the idea of procedural architecture to the experience itself? One thing I've experimented with is narrative elements that are mixed procedurally to understand how meaning comes about due to pieces that are adjacent to each other, just like in your renders. Maybe you could do that here.

Or make the fact that this world consists of procedural architecture part of the story. An idea I've had for a short videogame included having a terrain that repeats, which many players would just accept as a necessary evil to create more content. But in this case it is actually part of the fictional world. The character inside the world sees all the sudden that the environment is repeating and that clues him into the fact that something is wrong. You don't have to do that exactly, but maybe the construction of the architecture could play into the fiction of the world like that.

I've heard that programmers make far more money than the visual artists working in AAA development.

From my experience, this applies to all kinds of development. Right now I'm doing contract work to save up for projects down the road, and it's much easier to find programming work that pays well than production art or even design. I've always appreciated Blow's perspective: "Programming is Easy; Production is Harder; Design is Hardest." But people seem to value it in almost the opposite direction...

It's well worth a thorough read.

Make sure to hit up Ladder of Abstraction if you get the chance. His famous video is simply logical conclusions of the principles he lays out in that article.

Hey Bruno, welcome!

Maybe you should invite them over here then

http://rhondaforever.com/

Whaaaaaaaaaat?! That is amazing! Thank you so, so much for this link

Just a random thought I had - what if, instead of pulling verts to construct a logical volume, a tool was set up so you could instead trace silhouettes with your stylus?  You'd start with your front and side views, but it would let you rotate to any angle and trace the appropriate silhouette.  When rendered, you would see the drawn silhouette, or an interpolation between the closest ones available, depending on how many you drew at different angles.  The result would not be a volume that logically exists in 3D space, but there would be enough information that it would hold together visually from any angle, and it would hold the visual life you get from a manually done drawing.

In computer graphics lingo, this is referred to as an 'imposter,' and is usually rendered as a sprite raster image. I agree it would be cool to have a tool designed for this specific task, especially in vector. Usually how it works in game engines is that they are automatically generated from 3d models.

At a high enough resolution, there's no difference between that and polygonal sculpting. The next/most recent version of ZBrush is supposed to have it.

Thanks for sharing, I've been wanting to check this out for a while now. Hope I get a chance soon...

Yet I want to take on the challenge of ludology sometimes, as if it's the holy grail of gaming to tell through mechanics. But what are the limitations, and what could have been done differently in this specific case?

This challenge is precisely one of the reasons I started an initiative called Meaningful Gameplay: http://www.meaningfulgameplay.com The concept is to explore multiple versions of a small element of a game or videogame and then compare & contrast them to learn how meaning is generated.

The 2nd game jam is happening in 3 weeks, the weekend of May 25th-27th; feel free to join in remotely.

One of the best solutions I've seen to that problem is voxel-based sculpting. I believe 3D Coat is the first to have that feature.

It might be worth checking out, although the interface is still plenty technical. But once you get used to that, the actual act of voxel sculpting is pretty nice in that regard.