Can words be found in a landscape, without being told where to look?

Nothing on screen says “click here”. The stones are just stones until the player tries one. The current already bends around them, and that is the only hint that they matter.

A river carries memories downstream. The dead become stars and the living become stones. The stars are never drawn. They are the feeling the river gives off.

Each stone holds one line. Reading them is like stepping across someone’s memories, one stone at a time.

The canvas is tall and narrow, 400 by 700, so the river reads as something you look down into.

1. 01

   Watching

   A pale yellow river, moving slowly. It is calm, almost a pattern.

2. 02

   Noticing

   The current bends around the stones. The player wonders if they mean something, and clicks.

3. 03

   Listening

   Words rise from the stones and stay. The river has not changed, but now the player knows what it is carrying.

The river became a quiet reading game. Eight stones, four lines, placed at random each time, so no two rivers say things in the same order. The feeling that came out of it is finding, not being shown.

setup()

A 400 × 700 canvas. One FlowLine every 20 px across, and eight Stone objects at random positions.

FlowLine

A column of points every 10 px. Each frame they sway and are pushed away from nearby stones.

Stone

Random position and a radius of 15–30 px. Picks one of four lines and shows it, floating, once clicked.

draw()

Paints a translucent yellow over the canvas each frame, which leaves soft trails, then draws the current and the stones.

update() {
  for (let pt of this.points) {
    // the current sways gently as it moves down the screen
    let shift = sin((frameCount + pt.y) * 0.02) * 3;
    let px = pt.x + shift;

    // near a stone? push the water outward
    for (let stone of stones) {
      let d = dist(px, pt.y, stone.x, stone.y);
      if (d < stone.r + 10) {
        px += (px - stone.x) * 0.1;
      }
    }

    // ease toward the new position
    pt.x = lerp(pt.x, px, 0.1);
  }
}

Lightly condensed from the original for reading. The stones never move. The water does all the noticing.

Full source on OpenProcessing ↗The embedded sketch above also has a Code tab with the complete source.

See the method behind the series →