i don’t pretend to understand the math behind frequon invaders – and once upon a time the website contained an explanation of that math in great detail. but not knowing what the fourier domain is has never ruined my experience of the game.
you move your mouse cursor through a shifting field of color, searching for invaders hiding within (just waiting at first, later moving about on their own). the field changes as you move, and by paying attention to how it changes, you can creep closer and closer to the hidden invader until you finally spot its little bubble and pop it into particles. this isn’t a game about seeing through the noise to find the signal; what you see contains the positions of all the invaders on the screen, relative to where you are: it’s just a matter of learning to read it.
the whole screen, then, is your feedback. gently moving the mouse, you try to tease bars of darkness out of the rainbow, to isolate them, then to follow their grain to the place where darkness fills the screen, which is where the invader hides. learning how to read the screen – to interpret the information the game is constantly communicating – is the game here.
something about the way the game asks you to approach it – trying to feel out, with gentle, methodical mouse movements, the shape of a puzzle, like you might feel out the shape of an object, with your hands, in darkness – has always made me like this game.
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ah, that’s very interesting. I like that it’s in some sense possible to get an intuition for it, while it not necessarily being clear what exactly it is you are seeing.
(it’s hard though!)
it sounds brilliant; of course all i get is a crash
Thank you very much for the link. At first, it’s difficult to understand what’s going on but given time and the answers begin to present themselves. Of course, now I shut my eyes, I see nothing but a flashing rainbow that jives and bounces when I rub the outside of my eyelids.
Then again, that strange sensation in itself is only testament to your idea that it feels like a tangible product.
Thank you for the link :)
fourier transform is what is used to render spectrum analyzers in our media players. It transforms a wave (expressed temporarily, as you’d see a wave on the water) into the amplitude of its individual frequencies (low-freqs on the left, hi-freqs on the right, typically).
I guess what the author intends by “fourier domain” is actually the frequency space (hence the “frequons”)
HTH
Whoa! You know about Frequon Invaders too?!
I’ve been playing the Mac version since like six years ago.
Thanks for reminding me of it!
+10 for the small size of the exe!
I got to catch a few of whatever it is those things are, but I can’t really say that I understand the game. No, I don’t.
Huh, last version I have of this on my computer is 1.3 and I’ve never managed to get above about 30. Just downloaded version 2.0 off the website and got 51.
I think it comes from around invader 20/25-ish there’s like half a dozen on screen at once, and in 1.3 it seems to stay that way till you die, in 2.0 it’s just a short burst then the view port changes size, which isn’t equivalent in difficulty at all.
*This* is what I wish Immortal Defense played like, instead of a Tower Defense clone. Given its plot, it would have made a lot more sense.
I’m happy to hear that people generally find Frequon Invaders playable. I hit upon the idea when I was experimenting with games based on coordinate transforms on the mouse. Most were obvious things like rectangularpolar and other curvilinear schemes. When Fourier transforms occurred to me and I wrote the first version, I wasn’t sure if it would make any sense to anyone. But it seems to have worked out as something intuitive.
My latest effort is a much more traditional predator-prey simulation that can be downloaded from http://arch.robison.home.comcast.net/ecomunch.html .
My latest game is not as abstract as Frequon Invaders, but still off the beaten path. It’s a game of reflection seismology. Play it to learn what it means.
It can be downloaded from http://home.comcast.net/~arch.robison/seismic_duck.html
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