Texture Generation

Some idea to play with: 3 ca - one for each channel r,g,b. Several layerd ca - weakly interacting (4 neighbours in lower layer == 1 neighbour in upper layer?)

How to express all the rules this could produce in a concise way? Nieghbour coeffiecent to multiply by between layers? The rule needs to be expressible as a string for mutational variety

A few nights ago, I had a dream. Or rather, a nightmare. I dreamt that the dread Cthulhu could manifest himself as code. Not just any code, no clean straightline stuff, but twisty multi-dimensional code that slowly entraps and mangles the consciousness of the coder who read it, mangling their sanity and slowly extinguishing their sentience. 

It was at the point I realised that not only was I reading such code that I had personally written it that I woke up, in a cold sweat.

To all the victims of that hack that treated animation data as a 24-colour-channel image, offer my most sincere apologies...

It partly comes down to having had my "Twenty years of boredom trying to change the system from within."  I want to forget about the studios. In drafting this article I wrote a prolonged rant about them, detailing all the idiocies I and others have endured at their hands, but let us leave those bitter,  bileful experiences behind, push out the burning boat and piss goodbye on them.

The Indie "revolution" was inevitable, as they all are - with hindsight. As the technologies we use to create games become more and more accessible, putting together a game becomes less and less a technical ordeal and more and more a matter of artistry. Coupled with widespread digital distribution, the world has changed. The response of the old studio hands has been either to dig deeper in the seeming shelter of the big
studio; something that is doomed, as many have found, or to embrace it, as others, as fed up of studios as I have done.

I know success as an independent is far from guaranteed, but I entered this industry because I was intrigued and excited by the possibility of this medium to tell stories, that enmesh the player in lived experience. We learn about people via discourse through literature. With games we have a chance to turn that discourse into direct experience, except the most visceral kill-or-be-killed kind.  Thanks to the indie horde, the medium has begun to address this possibility. This is what I want to do, and it is what the Indies are the best hope of achieving. The degree to which we can achieve this is the true measure of success, not turnover, sales volumes or unit counts.

This makes me an idealist and as such, am resigned to being serially smacked in the teeth by reality: but, somehow I continue to hope.