Monthly Archives: August 2009

Silent Conversation Released

My July game, Silent Conversation, is released. It is a game about reading.

Read carefully. Run and jump through the text of stories and poems, from the horror of Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City” to the simple beauty of Bashou’s frog haiku. Go for completion or race through the pieces you’ve mastered!

Play Silent Conversation on Armor Games.

This game grew out of an idea that I had in childhood. I was a voracious reader, and occasionally, late at night, I would see the structure of the words on the page as something physical: the end of a paragraph was a fissure in a cliff edge, and each indentation was a handhold. I could visualize a little person running along the lines, exploring every crevice of the story. This is an attempt to realize that concept.

Torn Paper GIMP Filter


In the process of working on my next game, I found myself in need of a particular photo editing effect: torn paper, as if an image has been ripped out of a magazine and glued in place. I found an excellent method for the image editor I use, the GIMP, but it requires several steps. The solution? Script-fu! I haven’t coded in Scheme in forever, but it was relatively straightforward to put together a new filter.

Download the filter here.

Save it to your GIMP scripts directory, which will be ~/.gimp-2.6/scripts/ (or something like C:\Users\Gregory\.gimp-2.6\scripts for Windows users). The filter will be added to the end of your Filters menu. To use, just make a selection of any shape, make sure the layer you want to tear out is active, and go to Filters->Torn Paper. The filter will make a new layer with the torn out piece on it.

This filter allows you to make images like the one above. Cool, huh?