Hello, I'm Ivan

[Ivan]

Hello,

My name is Ivan Safrin. I've spent a long time being an utterly technical person, the past two years of my life being mostly occupied with writing a very ambitious engine (my own Unity/Processing of sorts), and thinking a lot about what I want to do with it. The project started out of a desire to make games, but the games I have been making with it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2rs1Yo3zO0) have been failing gloriously at the "game" part. I've always had an immense interest in interactive art, graphic design, visualization and information design, and I think that there is a lot to explore where all of these things meet games, notgames and all the other beautiful things out there.

This looks like a good place to explore them, and I'm happy to join.

Here's some stuff that I've worked on with other people (in various degrees of involvement) that you may find interesting:

http://adaptivelandscapes.com/projects/pastiche/index.html
http://www.minimaforms.com/project/becoming_animal.html
http://www.minimaforms.com/smokesignals/

[God at play]

Welcome! Man, this is great... Thanks for telling Stephen, too!

Also, Becoming Animal looks wild. 

[axcho]

Hey, you're the nanodoc guy, right? I recognize your name from Flixel...

It looks like you've been making some cool stuff. I don't understand how Becoming Animal works exactly, but it looks very intriguing.

I've also seen that Biocosm video before, and it gave me a lot to think about when it comes to physics-based interactions and artificial life games. Maybe the gameplay doesn't work so well in that instance, but I think there's still plenty of potential in that area.

[Michaël Samyn]

Welcome, Ivan! Pretty impressive that you are trying to make your own engine. What motivated you to do this (as opposed to just using an existing engine)?

I'm sharing the enthusiasm about Becoming Animal here. Are there any videos of this project?

[Ivan]

Hey, you're the nanodoc guy, right? I recognize your name from Flixel...

Yes, I have the dubious honor of writing nanodoc, although Adam is not using it anymore afaik.

What motivated you to do this (as opposed to just using an existing engine)?

I think I ask myself that question every day I think mostly because I was unhappy with what was out there at the time. Unity was expensive and prohibitive, Processing and Flash were too slow and unportable. So I ended up writing everything in C++ and compiling a library of reusable code, which eventually, with some organization turned into a solid engine. Then after playing with Unity I realized the value of scripting and being able to export the results to multiple platforms, so I wrote a Lua wrapper and a system that compiles a custom "executable" format as well as its own development application. I'm pretty happy with where it's going and I can't wait to share it with everyone once all the bugs are ironed out.

I'm sharing the enthusiasm about Becoming Animal here. Are there any videos of this project?

Unfortunately, Becoming Animal was very poorly documented, so the little video I have is not very good. I'll see if the guys I did it with can dig up any better footage.