Concept
I wanted to take the classic top-down style space shooter and decorate it using only text. So the same words don’t appear over and over, I use Big Huge Lab’s thesaurus api.
Process
I use Processing’s XMLElement to bring in synonyms for ‘ship’, ‘enemy’, and ‘bullet’. When the application is initialized the ship will have a random synonym assigned to it and each of the 30 enemies will have a word meaning enemy in some way representing them. Additionally, every time a bullet spawns when the user presses a mouse button, a random synonym for bullet will appear. For additional effect, when the “bullets” hit the enemies, it sends them into a devastating spiral.
Results
The text functions in Processing are lacking, there is no textHeight function and the text drawing function’s origin is at (0, textAscent()) which is fine but awkward when using matrix transformation functions.
Code: OSTRANDER2.zip