SynthFebruary 20, 2008
half-game, half-synthesizer and built with processing
Synth is an interactive hybrid game-synthesizer. It allows the user to create music in a novel but intuitive fashion. It's something between The Incredible Machine and loop-based Synthesizers/trackers.
Gameplay takes place in a 2D grid environment. As with The Incredible Machine the user may place different objects in the environment in order to build a sort of Rube Goldberg machine. However, in this case there are only a few types of objects to place in the environment. How they work and how to operate the game is reasonably intuitive. Discovering what they do is left as an exercise to the reader. You can click and drag any object, or simply clicking brings up a context menu. It is possilble to scroll through the environment by moving the mouse towards the edges of the browser, and to zoom with the scroll wheel.
There are three basic behaviors. Through these, complex systems can be developed. In this respect the game is similar to Conway's Game of Life. By grouping objects in different ways it is possible to form rudimentary logic gates. From these, complex timing schemes could be created. When mixed with other objects, a progressively changing rhythm can be achieved. Synth is built with Processing.
Play it in your browser (requires Java 1.4+)