Aniziz (the soil)

Posted Aug. 18, 2012 by Dave Griffiths

The borrowed scenery game has been named 'Aniziz' - from the 12th-century Lingua Ignota invented by Hildegard of Bingen. The term means 'the soil' and represents the game's role in the wider project, for nurturing plants found in the city, as well as the mapping element. It's working much more like a proper multiplayer game now as it has player accounts that use four types of avatar designed by Theun, representing patabotanical tarot versions of the Hermit, Hierophant, Magician and High Priestess. Your avatar will be picked when you register, in the form of a 'reading' ritual' - still to be designed.

The text rendering has been greatly improved - the support provided by HTML5 canvas is quite basic, so you need to do things like word wrapping yourself. Particle systems now provide more interactivity for the fungi and the game includes a chat mode for players using the same font as on the tagged city plants and the the android app. The thinking behind this is to create a situation where interpretation is encouraged over direct text communication, inspired (as in previous multiplayer online games I've worked on) by Tale of Tale's Endless Forest. The game will be made public closer to the event, but the code and assets for all these projects are now available on FoAM's git repository.

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