Loominary
Current Team: Josh McCoy, Sarah Hendricks, and Brittany Williams
Description:
Loominary is a game in which the player creates a tangible narrative artifact through the process of play. The game is a Twine game, which looks similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure style game. In the Twine games for Loominary, all the choices in the game are assigned specific colors.
The game controller is a physical table-top rigid heddle loom. To make a choice in the game, the player weaves a row in the artifact with yarn the same color as the choice they want to make. In this way, the player’s choices are literally woven into a physical record of their play session.
Mechanically, the loom is unaltered. However, the shuttles (flat wooden sticks that the yarn is wound around) each have a unique RFID tag sticker attached to them. Each shuttle is pre-wound with a unique color and the system is calibrated to match the RFID to that yarn color. The games are run on a Raspberry Pi that is also connected to the RFID reader. All of the electronics are concealed in the box that the loom sits on top of.
