Breakout Hacked into Art in Processing

Game Mod was a workshop by Steph Thirion in Barcelona last month. The idea: take code for a simple game of Breakout, rendered in Processing, and mess it up so it looks like art. The surprise: participants weren’t programmers, and they got results in minutes rather than long hours.
Game Mod [Project page, descriptions, code, video]
The task of each participant was to create a mod of the game: dig into the code, change its looks and behaviours, search for unexpected results.
…
Graphic design students, with almost no previous experience in coding, were pushed head first into object oriented programming. They discovered that in the complex system of a game program, change can lead to unexpected and beautiful results, and their lack of knowledge of the tool was more a creativity boost than it was a limitation.
Of course, the advantage here: there was source code to start with. And as I have to keep telling my students, starting with code examples is a good idea. (That’s why experienced coders do it.) This Breakout is a little different, in that balls bounce off all the walls in sort of an “everybody wins” version of the game — perfect for visualists.
Okay, non-coders — and coders — are you up to the challenge? You can download the code from the project page above and try it yourself. I like the idea of giving a time limit and not thinking about it too much. Maybe some instant sketching in Processing every day isn’t a bad idea.







2 Comments or Links
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Create Digital Motion » Pirates and Roasted Penguins: The Oddest Processing Game You’ll Play This Year
[...] Breakout Hacked into Art in Processing [...]
December 23, 2008 @ 11:01 am
Comments
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i love this, amazing project. All works the students produced were amazing,
ill post my edits when im done. Thnx for the code!
****EDIT
April 17, 2007 @ 4:17 pm
steph thirion
thanks for this great post peter. You’ve managed to write it all in just a few lines. I’ll add a link to this from the game mod page.
April 20, 2007 @ 7:13 am
Other Sites Linking Here
CDM Labs » Ignite: Visual Code Literacy with Processing, in Five Minutes
[...] you don’t understand can be a great learning experience. For instance, see what happens when students start to “mess up” the game Breakout to transform it aesthetically and make new [...]
July 29, 2008 @ 5:47 pm
learning processing | the valley of lost things
[...] meantime, you could follow the idea of learning by tinkering with existing code and try breaking Breakout into art. Attempts by non-programmers show that lack of familiarity with the language isn’t a [...]
December 29, 2008 @ 3:49 am
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