Protein Art We have recruited an expert structural biologist to our project! Martina Maritan, Ph.D. is a structural biologist, which means she studied the shape of proteins, and in particular, she used X-Rays the same way Rosalind Franklin did. Now she is a postdoc in the Molecular Graphics Lab, led by Art Olson and working with David Goodsell on an amazing project called CellPack and CellPAINT: she’s exactly the artist and the scientist for us!
Check out Martina’s poster https://vizbi.org/Posters/2021/vB26 Look at this beautiful art!!!
Tom Miller @AudioMyo is creating the sound design. He is inspired by Rez Infinite by @enhance_exp which thrills me!
On the one hand I am thrilled because Rez has such a Tron like feel…. back in my day, the only thing cooler than Tron was Michael Jackson. *Sigh* But my grown up, game designer reason why Rez Infinite’s sound design makes me so excited is that the player creates additions to the music by shooting things, and that is fun.
… our game is intended to introduce the true chaos of a living cell surface. Chaos can be intimidating to a game player; no one likes feeling out of control. However, if we hear tones when we crash into proteins, then we’ll be creating music as we play!
In Rez, they made it so that as the player shoots 5 objects, they explode in a nicely timed sequence. Our sounds will be randomly spaced. Randomness is really a hard concept to grasp, so it’s important to provide the feeling. But it is definitely a design challenge to make it enjoyable.
First step is to make a build with the music and 4 different sounds, 1 for each of our new protein types. If you would like to play with this build, months ahead of the more polished release, you are invited to support us on Patreon.com/molecularjig.
If $3/month is to much, if you’d like to help as a developer, or if you are a teacher/professor and would like to involve your students/self in our game play testing… Email me a Melanie at Molecularjig dot com. 🙂
Thank you all for your support. Please keep in touch!
