Terrain Poetry Generator

Wow, I had created this blog post back in April, and for whatever reason, never published it. Anyway, here it is:

I've created a poetry generator to assist me with experiments in EMP-LIT. The resultant poems are a form of ASCII Terrain poem, in that the poems themselves resemble large (> 400 pages) world maps.

The generator was written in .python. I am still tweaking/updating, but you may have this version to play with: terrainpoetrygen.py

Further description from the code comments:

# ASCII Terrain Poetry Generator
# Sonny Rae Tempest
#
# 4/26/14
#
# Best viewed with monospaced fonts.
# Super-best viewed with monospaced typewriter fonts.
#
# This program will create a file named terrainpoem.txt in this directory.
# That file will be the poem.
#
# With default settings, will create a randomly generated poem > 400 pages
# at Courier New 12 pt font with ASCII characters chosen based upon their
# appearance related to terrain.
#
# Read from top to bottom, north to south, the poem which is generated
# will resemble a map of an enormous world, with changes in terrain determined
# randomly.
#
# There are near-infinite possibilities. You may need to run this program
# several times to experience all possible terrain.
#
# Be on the lookout for wildlife & small settlements.
#
# After all, this poem is their story.

Additionally, I'd published an iteration in book form on lulu, which I also forgot about. From the book description:

A Terrain Poem is a single iteration of my terrain poetry generator. I have included the python code for this generator in this book. This is an experiment in poetics and randomly-generated ASCII-style maps. The goal was to create a large-scale atlas from which a story would emerge. I chose this iteration because I really enjoyed the ending. srt #emp-lit

You may find it here: A Terrain Poem , or you may download a .pdf here: A Terrain Poem.pdf

Enjoy!
SRT

Authoring Generative Poetry via Game Worlds

** A Game about the Authorship of a Story about a Character in a Game. **

Goal: To explore methods of autoarchiving possible imaginative experiences of platformer-style video gameplay through the generation of textual narrative from within a game environment.

To keep this initial experiment manageable, a game world was created which exhibits a great degree of visual abstraction and traditional play mechanics. This way, the attention could be focused on text generation, and not gameworld aesthetics.

To build the game world in an expedient manner, I followed the tutorial available at http://www.programarcadegames.com/, which was simple enough to butcher once operational.

This work is partially inspired by the chapbook World 1-1 by Philip Miletic and Craig Dodman, in which both authors document actions within various playthroughs of the first level of the NES' Super Mario Bros. I feel that World 1-1 works superbly as an archive and as a written account of classic console gameplay, which this game strives to do.

Remainderly, inspiration comes from decades of wanting to develop a manner of logging actions, dialogue, &c. from old Sierra On-line PC games, so that I could read the story of my playthrough after completing the quest. Seems like a reasonable request.

------------------

Download (link at bottom of page), extract, and launch game.exe to start the game.

The game may be completed 3 different ways:
- Press 'q' to Quit.
- Fire all 6 bullets.
- Let 10-second timer expire.

The controls are as follows:
- 'a'     left
- 'd'     right
- 'w'     jump
- 'space' fire
- 'q'     quit

When the game environment opens, you have ten seconds to run around the house and fire your weapon. As you run around platform-style, each of your moves is logged and used to generate a short narrative about the game, the house, and the player (including an additional, unseen character). The more moves you make, the more passages will be generated in your logfile. When the game is over, a text file: gamelog.txt, is saved to the game's file location. Open this text file to read the generated work.

 ------------------

You may download game here: game.zip. Once downloaded, extract the .zip and run game.exe.

At this point, this game.exe has been tested only on Windows 8.1 64-bit. Please let me know if this works/works not in your Windows OS.

Enjoy!
SRT

Rogue: Menagerie

ROGUE: MENAGERIE is a conceptual text which aims to explore and experiment with translation, rhetoric, and archivism by a turn-by-turn documentation of play through an unsuccessful game of Rogue.

It available for download here: ROGUE: MENAGERIE

It is also available for purchase in print here: BOOK

Enjoy!

SRT

Ce n'est pas un virus.

Ce n'est pas un virus.

For Windows only.

Download at your own risk*.

Mwahahahahaha!

SRT

* It's perfectly safe. Use Task Manager to kill the task, or reboot. You'll be fine.

A Tabletop Dungeon Escape Game

Hello World.

 

I made a new game.

 

It's a tabletop dungeon escape game played atop QR code maps (all scan-able, yay!).

 

It is called Queen Regent's Dungeon Escape.

 

I made this for my kids for Christmas, but unfortunately didn't finish in time to receive a print of this, so I will need to print this on my printer for them.

 

But the book is now available here: Queen Regent's Dungeon Escape

 

I figured, since you can't get it by Christmas either, I will give you all a download of this book here: QRDE.pdf

 

You can print it from your printer.

 

This download will be available through December 25th, 2013.

Download and play with your kids!

 

Merry Christmas!

 

-SRT

345 - Fun w/ Numbers

 

I realized I hadn't updated this blog in a while (sorry, been busy with things I'm sure I'll update you about in the near future). So, I calculated you all a poem.

There are two ways to read 345: one way is to read it as a series of numbers, the other is to read it as a series of letters. 180-degrees, ya dig?

Here is the poem as a zip file of 13 images: 345_srt.zip

Um, Enjoy!

SRT

TERMINAL BOOT: An Experiment in EMP-LIT

TERMINAL BOOT is an experiment in translating methods and delivery of digital literature to a purely pen-&-ink medium. The load time of electronic work is here represented with printed words, producing a text which reflects not only the visual characteristics of a boot screen, but also the time taken to load a larger piece of software by an honest read-through.

Additionally, this book is an experiment in pacing, tension and resolution, through erratic progress indication.

The conclusion is intentionally open-ended, so that this book may serve as a thought-provoking standalone artifact, or as a prologue to any existing work of printed text.

It may be found here: TERMINAL BOOT

Enjoy!

-SRT