Re-Prairie is my entry to LowRezJam 2024. It's a light puzzle game where you play as prairie grass, growing and winding through a desolate anthropocene environment. I just want to highlight a few technical / conceptual ideas here.

Procedural Guitar

I'm very excited about this technique. I found a pre-existing recording of someone strumming a guitar, then made an array of "tonics", (floats that describe a change from the starting note to a new note). Each time you place a tile, the game selects a random tonic and applies it to the original recording. By sculpting the set of tonics, we end up with a specific, but procedurally generated song. This oblique approach really resonates for me and feels like it opens up working in audio in a way I haven't previously.

Radical Illegibility

This is a concept that comes back again and again in my studio practice. I'm interested in work that intentionally obscures information or renders itself unclear or opaque. It invites two modes of viewing: trying to peel back the curtain to see "through" the surface or unfocusing your eyes and just letting it wash over you. It also provokes questions about the other kind of access - who is entering the magic circle of the game with the necessary resources (time, prior knowledge, etc.) to engage with it. I'd like for my games to interact  more intentionally with this second idea in the future, but I think the scintillating, intentionally grid-breaking forms here really work for me.

64 x 64

While this was obviously a requirement of the jam, the idea of screening or filtering a game really appeals to me. Especially when that screening is not an arbitrary (or at least is only a pseudo-arbitrary) aesthetic decision, but instead fills some practical purpose. Compression like this reads as a sort of scar of a dialectic process, one term colliding with the opposite and emerging as a new synthetic form, but riddled with stray pixels and weird UI ideas as a result. I don't know if I'll work this small in the future, but I like the idea of applying an intentionally compressed resolution to future works. Ideally this would be linked not just to a challenge or look, but to some actual use case or function. Even if that function is just being nonfunctional.