MicroSwarmigism

Joel and I have been talking about making a game together that has to do with controlling a swarm or swarms of tiny organisms. This is going to involve flocking behavior, Genetic Algorithms for traits, and possibly several other techniques (I may work in RGEP if it has a place), as well as lots of art, animation, and creative awesomeness. Joel has already done some great videos to show off ideas for the game and to give people a feel for it, as well as develop our understanding of it. You can see these videos on his blog, http://sculptorbyday.blogspot.com/.

The current plan is to use Unity, which is completely new to me, so I need to get a copy of Windows and start programming. I will probably use C#, but Javascript and Boo are not out of the question- I just don't know enough about any of them to have very strong opinions (opinions are very welcome- please!). I will have to learn quite a lot to get anything working, which I'm excited about. Games are such an expressive, visual, and interactive type of programming that I have only some small experience with, and hopefully a nice balance to the embedded systems programming I do for a living. I've always loved visualization of complex things like Genetic Algorithms and Particle Swarms, and the beautiful images (and games?) they give rise to.

MicroSwarmigism! As Fry from Futurama once said- girls like swarms of things, right?