After some very thorough testing with my lovely friends, Artle now has a stable multiplayer mode, the Art Room.
There were some great suggestions, such as; a loading symbol for pending guesses, a way to view your personal score and ranking, a floating log in / sign up panel, some fixed padding for improved readability, changing artist scores to average number of guesses, and disabled image save as permissions. A very special thank you to Charlotte also, for giving her expert knowledge and advice.
The multiplayer mode uses similar design language to Kahoot!, with multiple choice options and a timed count down. The host's view displays live scores, indicating if players are generally agreeing or not in their answers. An end score page reveals the top three players, and lists the artists that were seen in the game and the average number of guesses it took to correctly identify them.

Thank you to Nathan for showing me how to use Chrome DevTools to check cookies and session data, and making sure I stay FISMA compliant in my personal information (pi) storage.

Thank you to Gareth for teaching me about the network tab, and how to record a network log, and that a many MB .gif taking over a minute to load was perhaps something to change. Turns out .png works better in every way and it's open source!

The first prototype of EcoGuessr is now live!

The Insta360 camera takes .dng images, their native RAW format. These must then be exported through the Insta360 Studio as a '360 photo' which converts them into a equirectangular panorama. This file can then be imported into Lightroom, edited, and then exported as a .jpg. Now the file can be uploaded to the website host and is ready to be added, alongside some additional details such as coordinates, into the EcoGuessr rotation.
To view this 360 image, EcoGuessr uses Pannellum, a lightweight open source panorama viewer. This allows the viewer to pan around the image and zoom in and out. Below this is a map rendered by MapLibre GL JS, with pins that indicate all possible locations of the image. The idea is to guess the correct pin location. I was envisaging this game across all of Australia's most beautiful and significant National Parks, but I'm really enjoying using ebird.org/hotspots to find biodiverse patches within Melbourne. It follows the reccuring topic of my university studies that there is great advantage to small ecological pockets within a city.

Artle now has a daily mode! Testing on the gameplay is complete, and the original format has been relocated to 'Studio Mode', a continuous freeplay mode. The Daily is now linked to accounts, and users can maintain a 'streak' through playing every day. The difficulty setting applies to the daily, with the copied results indicating which difficulty the game was played in.
I am so excited to have this feature up and running. The UI/UX is really beginning to take shape. I'm happy that to me the colour palette reads as a modern take on 'old masters'. Brown buttons indicate a 'switch' or gameplay modifier, and orange buttons indicate a 'launch' or gameplay action.
Next is the implementation of 'artist groups' so players can narrow down the pool of artists they would like to see in Studio Mode.

Birdle has accounts and a Daily game mode now! It is now possible to create an account, play the daily game mode, and begin building a streak.

This comes with the addition of a Freeplay mode, so it is still possible to practice.

With the upcoming addition of accounts, I needed to create an authentication system that would store and process these accounts. This is where the Computer comes from. I found myself leaning into a old-internet aesthetic, and ultimately decided I might as well reconstruct the look and feel of Windows 95, because that'd be cute. Complete with desktop icons, minimisable and moveable windows, and a taskbar, the Computer exists as a central hub of my growing list of various web projects.

For many years I have been able to side step doing any web development that involved storing passwords, and miraculously that streak continues through passwordless authentication with Magic Links. When a user attempts to log in, they are prompted to input their email. A verification code is then sent to this email, which the user enters. If an associated account is found, they are logged in, if not, they are prompted to create an account. No passwords, and significantly reduced vulnerability. A compromised email has always been a weak link, through the 'Forgot my Password' option. Magic Links take this to the natural end and forgo the password altogether. It cannot be leaked if it never existed.

The idea for Recci emerged on one of a few 7 hours drives on a road trip to Central Australia.

The first complete version of Artle is now live, after a very special pilot launch at Art Show Pakenham. It was submitted as an interactive art installation in the special category 'Think Outside the Square', because in the endless debate of 'what is art', when does website cease being digital art on the web and become just a web page? If neither Kant, nor Tolstoy, nor Wagner could define a singular boundary of 'art', then a category showcasing art that has gone beyond boundaries might be inclined to celebrate such a proposition.
Valuable feedback from this pilot has led to the creation of a difficulty setting. Players were often finding it frustrating to draw artist names from memory without any prompting; one player even found that by viewing the artist database page, they were able to find the artist from the list of names, allowing them to guess correctly. I wanted to work with and encourage this playstyle to make the game more engaging and accessible.
The difficulty setting defaults to 'Apprentice' but can be set to 'Master'. Master is the original game format, with a text-entry mode. Apprentice is the new format, which presents a multiple choice selection from four artists. In both difficulties each incorrect guess, or skip, reveals a new artwork and another opportunity to guess until all the artworks have been shown or the correct artist is guessed.
By observing the points where players were experiencing frustration or losing interest and having the opportunity to hear direct feedback, I was able to make valuable changes that significantly improve the appeal of the game.

The seed of the idea for EcoGuessr came from conversations between the Birdle team; what if we could push Birdle further, into guessing where in Australia you are based on the assemblage of bird species heard in a recording? And what if we pulled inspiration from GeoGuessr, and combined that with Street View? But of course the problem is that there aren't many birds by roadsides, in fact usually the further away you get from car infrastructure the more birds you find. And so the idea to use my 360 camera, and take the photos myself, was born.

The format of EcoGuessr, as I currently envisage it, will be as follows: the user is presented with a 360 photo which they may pan about within freely. This will be a recognisable section of a natural area, such as the mountain peak of a hike. The user will be presented with a map of Australia, populated by pins that represent a 360 photo. The user must then attempt to pick the correct pin based on recognition of geographical features, climate, native species. Ideally this would be paired with a recording taken from nearby of bird calls. The locations would not be limited to national parks, but include any area of ecological significance, including urban biodiversity patches.

The first working prototype is now live and ready to be shared! A selection of 47 birds from 42 families and 22 orders has been hard-coded into the game. The finished game will pull from a database of just over 750 birds, but while the gameplay and design is being perfected, 45 will do just fine. Placeholder images are being used, that will eventually be replaced with custom drawings.

A big thank you to Skye for their help working out some of the details with the game logic. By straightening out that the game is first and foremost an educational tool, built to improve skills and knowledge, gameplay priorities fell into place. We decided that for instances where a category contained two or even just a single option (such as the Columbiformes order only containing the Columbidae family, or the Pandionidae family only containing the Pandion haliaetus cristatus species) instead of combining categories to ensure a high enough pool of choices - the categories would remain as they are, with a note to explain the circumstance. The gameplay aspect of guessing is replaced with highlight an interesting piece of taxonomy.
They also lended their eyes to some UX/UI accessibility tweaks. This has always been one of my favourite aspects of design, since my first web design class when I was 15. Taught by Mr W, the teacher who taught me how to see the language of math when I thought I'd never understand. I remember being amazed to learn about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), a collaboration of people and ideas to decide on the clearest and most legible way to communicate.

New version released today, proof of concept with a very limited selection of birds, demonstrating playability.
Rooso got me on board with using Git, and now my _v2 file based version control feels like cave man behaviour. The way it breaks down every change, and intelligently merges it into the project, is so delightfully logical.
I'm still sad I never got to finish the Computer Science unit that was going to teach my how Git worked, AI for Games. It was taught by Tien, the best teacher I ever had in my bachelors degree. I was enrolled into that unit for Semester 1, 2020.
Rooso updated my Visual Studio Code too and wow, the quality of life conveniences they've put into that thing over the past five years are very impressive.

Sav told me about this new game the otherday, Payphone Tag, built by Alex Allchin. It's Pokemon Go all over again, but simpler, better. The other night we spent a good few hours roaming the streets until Cremorne was ours, a network of cells connected through sixteen payphones.
Now that my bike's been repaired, I'm back on the road getting some footage, with new motivation.

150km later and I was ranked 10th in Australia, my cell was ranked 1st in Australia, and the entire CBD was ours.

Game modes have now been added, currently with the option to select 'All Artists', 'Iconic Australians', and 'Contemporary'. This allows me the space to expand with a variety of artists, while still preserving a 'Classic' mode of highly recognisable artists ones would expect to see in major state galleries.
The artist database is now live, allowing users to view all the artists currently in the game, and their biographical information.
Finally, added an about page, with more details on my intention behind and for the game.
Coming next I'll be looking into if the API is the best option, especially if I'm expanding by connecting with contemporary artists.

I've begun play testing, and I've adjusted a few artworks for difficulty, trying to have them in order of most difficult to most recognisable. It also appears that the scaling on a tablet is a bit high, making it difficult to view the artwork and guess at the same time.

I am having great difficulty deciding how categorisation should work within the game. As one might expect of a standardised classification system made to categorise natural systems and processes, taxonomy is quite complicated and fickle. It is likely some sort of custom categorisation system will have to be made to adjust for a game based on auditory comprehension. Gareth and I were experimenting with tone based categories; Melodic, Whistles, Chatty, Screeching, Rhythmic, Mechanical, Mimetic, Resonant. This would be very interesting for investigating the ways in which species with similar calls differ from or resemble each other. I was playing around with a 'type' classification; Seabirds, Shorebirds, Waterbirds, Birds of prey, Ground birds, Forest birds, Grassland birds. This gets messy quickly though. How broad can types be before they are meaningless? How specific can types be before they are just describing habitat and behaviour?

Currently have nine artists, from the colonial and impressionist art movements, as their artworks are in the public domain and can reproduced through Creative Commons under Australian law.

Very exciting news is that Cardinia Art Society has agreed to sponsor the web hosting, and has connected me with two contemporary artists who have given their permission to add them into the game!
First I need to finish writing the bios (history, art movement, style and motifs) and hints for the current artists, and add a tag system to customise the artists shown when playing.

Development of birdle has begun, and it all started from downloading Bird Rise, an alarm clock app that ensures you're awake by having you guess the bird by the call that has just been played instead of an alarm tone. Absolutely fantastic idea, but I was frustrated by being made to guess American or European birds that I'm not very familiar with. I wanted a bird call guessing game that helped me identify the sounds I hear while out and about in my daily life. So I decided to start working on Birdle.

The first prototype is live now, and while a very rough draft, it's great to have a proof of concept. Especially helpful as an aid in explaining how I envision the game working - to my new collaborators!
Really pleased to be working on this with my very talented friends, between us all I'm feeling good about getting this off the ground.

The first hurdle is establishing a categorical structure. Using family taxonomy isn't quite working as some families can be very obscure, considering constructing our own categorical system based on bird field guide quick ID categories.

Made a wireframe for a 'Birdle' guessing game today. I'm thinking of having an audio byte of an Australian bird (potentially fetched via the Xeno-canto API), followed by three silhouettes of bird families. Guessing the right bird family then shows you three distribution maps, and guessing the correct map shows you three bird species.

I'll have to draw all the silhouettes myself as image representations of taxonomic families don't really exist. It'd be nice to have the 'guess the bird species' image also be a drawing, but that would be around 1,000 unique drawings, so we shall see.

Thinking about a 'Frogger' / 'Plants vs Zombies' / 'Papers Please' / 'Diner Dash' style web game but set in a bar to conceptualise the chaos of my job.
Definitely a back burner project, more of an idea to mull over and keep me sane during long shifts. It really does feel like waves of zombies.

I've been playing Artle by the National Gallery of Art as part of one of my 'Wordle' style games rotation for awhile now (Worldle remains my favourite) but I've been getting frustrated with the lack of Australian representation.
I think Australia has a really rich art history, and I want a gamified way to learn about it, so I've decided to start building an Australian Artle.

I've made the wireframe design, picked out a colour palette and font, and have started building a list of iconic Australian artists; from Streeton and Beckett to Nolan and Kngwarreye.
I think I should be able to use the Wikimedia Commons API to fetch and load images without needing to host them myself, which should keep me well above any copyright issues.

Starting to build an art style for linocut printing, to make stamps for t-shirts.
Day dreaming about a cropped shirt with a hand-carved fish print on it.

I've started collecting the footage for this, but the tragic implosion of my GPU has meant the editing and publishing of this project is on hold for the time being.

The website went live today!

It has been my dream for many years now to build my own site and have it online, and indeed how momentus that feels. In an age where the price to pay for having a digital presence on social media is to be at the mercy of the algorithm, the resurgence of 'old internet' style web pages feels like reclaiming a bit of agency.