The Abyss

A Processing workshop about polymorphism
by
Andreas Gysin
2010-2013

Purpose

The idea behind The Abyss project was to build a system and then let everyone contribute, with a good balance between individual and collaborative work. Students could build new creatures or expand features of the abyss itself. For beginners it was easy enough to contribute with a basic creature, more advanced students could train their graphic skills or even build creatures which interacted with other creatures.
A few example creatures are included.

Creature rules

• Extend the supercreature class and build your own creature.
• Allowed colors are white with alpha shades. Not a strict rule.
• Each creature must implement the move() and draw() methods (see the SuperCreature class for details).
• Transforms should use the pos, rot, sca vectors as those are used to track creatures in space.
• Animations can be timed with frames or actual time.
• The name of the new creature class is built with the authors initals and the creature name. This is not an optimal naming convention but it works with 10-20 people as each class name must be unique (Steve Zissou + Cubus = SZCubus).
• The .pde file should have the same name of the class (for example: SZCubus.pde).
• Insert your name, the creature name, the version and the build date in the constructor.
• Break all rules and build something new.