mem.palace

Jan Holmevik challenged me to speed-create a short video after reading Gregory Ulmer's Internet Invention. I wanted to push myself to do something more difficult — more interactive. I suggested coding a video game instead. (It was a crazy idea considering that I had only three games under my belt.)

Assets

I speed-created Memory Palace over one sleepless, coffee-fueled weekend. It's not my best work, but the experience of quick-coding was fun.

Having less than 48 hours to put this together, I was forced to take a few shortcuts. The character sprites are not my own. I downloaded them from Sithjester, then made small adjustments to the coloring in Photoshop. The audio was taken from an interview with Ulmer, mixed on royalty-free Bach music from the Internet Archive.

The in-game artworks on the walls are actual photographs, though I fed them through Google Deep Dream (a convolutional neural network) and the Prisma application. The same as with the sprites, I made adjustments to the output in Adobe Photoshop.

Let’s Play – Video

The game is more of a simulation — there's no objective; the protagonist walks around the museum of his own mind, meditating on artworks that have personal meaning. It's slow and thoughtful.

Download

I'm not sure why you would want to download this game. It's boring and buggy and weird (and I don't plan on adding anything to it). But if you want to play it on Windows, here's the install file, and here's the GMS source code.