Castles Made of Castles

Today I’m releasing Castles Made of Castles – a building tool where the pieces are the same as the whole.

bank

Castles Made of Castles was commissioned by, and first playable at, the Now Play This festival in London. Game events offering commissions or exhibitor fees are rare, so I’m really grateful for the opportunity. Since the festival it’s been waiting around for me to tie up a few loose ends, and now that Push Me Pull You is finished, I’ve found the focus to give it a proper release.

Castles mixes fractals and voxels. Like most of my work on this site, the idea came from some pencil and paper fractal castles I had drawn. Originally I envisioned something like a 3d version of my fractal machine; a bunch of sliders that controlled tower spacing, height or whatever. Once I started working on the algorithm I realized I just need a quick way to place blocks, and decided a minecraft/infiniminer style interface would be better.

Making another ‘sciencevsmagic.net’ project after so long was lots of fun. The work on this site is quite consistent, with very similar constraints, and I let that guide my design. It felt very natural to fill Castles out with click and drag, infinite zoom, undo/redo, random colors, and storing all the data in the URL.

If you make a nice castle, please post it in the comments.

17 thoughts on “Castles Made of Castles

    • Each of the images I posted is also a link to that Castle, so by clicking through and undoing/redoing you can see how I made it.

      The only thing that changes the shape of the blocks is the shape of the Castle changing as more blocks are placed.

Leave a Reply to sciencevsmagic Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Fill in the blank to prove you are human: