Welcome! I promised some news today, and here it is.

There was a lot of talk at GDC this year about prototyping. I have been very keen to get the ball rolling, prototype-wise, and to that end I have started learning Flash, and Action Script. Tonight, I unveil the fruits of this weekend’s labor, my first Flash project. Please, hold your applause until the end of the performance.

My plan is to intersperse, at irregular intervals, Flash prototypes of certain design ideas and elements of gameplay in the updates to Design a Day.

This is not going to happen with the current publication schedule, so I am going to switch to a M-W-F update schedule for Design a “Day.” I’m still targeting 50 designs, it will just take a few more weeks to get there.

So without further ado, I present…The Chrome Cow Burroughsian Design-A-Tron!

A few words about the Design-a-tron. It is one of those pick-a-word from columns A, B and C and link them together widgets. The key of course is picking useful words for each column, which is going to be an on-going background task.

The basic construct is Video Game meets Popular Culture Artifact as Human Endeavor.

The idea is that it functions as an automated Burroughsian Cut-Up, with our cultural heritage and all areas of human endeavor as the source material. Because I do like to think big.

It is not a machine for creating ideas, but the surreal and sometimes amusing results do provide some material to fire the imagination. When confronted by “Resident Evil meets A Doll’s House as Darwinism,” the mind tries to impose some meaning. Sometimes a cool idea emerges. Mostly just laughs.

I’ve built the basic structure of the Human Endeavor database by trawling the course offerings of a number of Universities, assuming they have already done some of the heavy lifting, taxonomy-wise.

Currently there are about 2500 entries in the database, and the Human Endeavor database is only populated with Physics, Sociology and Theatre, with a smattering of Architecture. This mix is a little dry. It also leaves about 40 categories in a stubs currently. So that, and a few idiosyncrasies of Flash that are still plaguing me make this a beta release.

I think things will start to get really interesting around 10,000 entries.

One feature I really like is the ability to launch a Google search for each of the three terms.

That’s it for tonight. I’ll post updates as they happen. In future, I’ll flag any design-a-day posts that were inspired by the Design-a-Tron.

Enjoy!

-game over-

Thanks for reading another action-packed installment of Design a Day. For background on the Design A Day challenge, take a peek here and here.