A couple of weeks ago, I started digging into the Web Audio API. Initially, I was just looking to find out what it was and see if any ideas for toys presented themselves but, kinda predictably, I ended up getting elbow-deep in a bucketful of audio routing graphs, gain nodes and impulse responses.

I'll write up a more detailed post about the API shortly but Max and I used it quite heavily in the 5apps hackathon we attended last week and I wanted to share the outcome of our hacking.

SoundScape

“A Nokia Map mashed together with a bunch of APIs and positional audio to create an immersive map experience.”

For a better explanation of how SoundScape works, check out Max's slides:

• http://mmarcon.github.com/slides/soundscape/

In essence, we use a Nokia Map as the base, add on a Flying Hamster, make a call to Freesound.org for geotagged audio samples, male a call to LastFM for upcoming concerts, make a call to Deezer for the most popular track by the artist playing the event reported by LastFM and put them all together in the browser using 3D positional audio. Basically.

The source is available on GitHub

The Actual Demo

SoundScape (Web Audio API-capable browser required)

Silly CSS Fun for a Sunday Afternoon

Yesterday, I decided to mess around with 3D CSS transforms. I've used them here and there for various things (the flip animations in Shelvi.st, for example) but nothing silly.

My mind wandered back to an early HTML5 canvas demo I saw ages ago where Jacob Seidelin had written Super Mario Kart in JS and I wondered if it would be possible to do the pixel-pushing part of that demo in CSS.

An hour later and we have this:

Super Mario Kart CSS

Yes, it's silly. Yes, it's nothing like playing Mario Kart and, no, there isn't any acceleration. That wasn't the point, however. View the source to see the description of the rotations and transforms.

This weekend, I had a spare couple of hours on Saturday night (as often happens when you have a kid) so I decided to pass the time with a bit of copy-paste coding.

I grabbed a bit of example code for a top-down racing game built using Box2d and GameJs. I then grabbed a Google Maps demo and a Nokia Maps demo and smooshed them together. I've seen a few racing games before so I know there's nothing innovative here, it's just a bit of silliness.

The results

• Driving on Nokia Maps
• Driving on Google Maps

Copy-Paste: Not a bad thing

There are many developers who will tell you that blindly copy-pasting is a terrible way to code. They make the valid points that you don't understand something if you don't read it properly and that you'll end up stuck down an algorithmic cul-de-sac with no way to three-point-turn your way out (although they may phrase it differently). These are valid points but...

If I'd sat down on Saturday night and thought "I want to build something in Box2D" then gone to the site, downloaded the library, read the docs and loaded the examples, by the time I had understood what I was doing, Sunday morning would have come round and I'd still have GameJS to read up on. There's absolutely no harm in blindly catapulting yourself a long way down the development track then looking round to see where you are. Sure, you'll end up somewhere unfamiliar and you may end up with absolutely no clue what the code around you does but at least you have something to look at while you figure it out. At least a few times, you'll find something almost works and a quick search of the docs later, you've figured it out and know what it's doing.

Basically, copy-pasting together a simple little demo and making it work is a lot more interesting than taking baby-steps through example code and beginner tutorials. Don't be too careful about trying to build something complicated.

Another game concept prototype – Sine

Honestly, I have no idea what I was going for with this one. It started off last weekend with a vague idea about matching patterns of numbers and old-school graphics and I don't know what and ended up with this.

The idea is to make the bottom row match the top row, basically. There are several front-ends to this game so you can choose the style of play you prefer - numbers and letters, waves, colours or a generated sound wave (if you have a shiny new-fangled browser). It uses the nifty little Riffwave library to generate PCM data and push it into an audio element.

Further development

If I were to develop this further, I'd try and build it in a modular fashion so that front-ends could be generated really easily and open it to other people to see how many different ways this game could be played. It'd be an interesting social experiment to be able to play what is fundamentally the same game in a dozen different ways. You could find out if visual thinkers processed the information faster than numerical or audio-focused people. Leaderboards could allow different styles of player to compete on the same playing field but with a different ball (hmm, weak sports analogy). The rhythms of the game lend themselves well to generated drum tracks so there's probably something in that area for exploring as well.

At the moment, the code is written as the programming equivalent of stream-of-consciousness – global variables everywhere, some camel-case, some underscored, vague comments sprinkled around. There's some commented-out code for the wave mode that moves the waves closer together so that there's a time-limit set but I felt it didn't suit the game.