Invitation to Participate in ChessMate campaign+exhibition

TribeOfLions

Hello everybody!

I'd like to invite Processing coders to participate in a campaign and exhibition that myself and a group of 12 international volunteers are coordinating. We want to establish a cultural/innovation center in Africa and we're using Processing work as perks on an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign.

Specifically, I'm trying to build an app with Processing that transforms chess games into digital art. In fact, I've already written a huge part of the script for this and I've produced a number of works. I'm looking for Processing coders at all levels of skill to support with the development of this app in terms of improving the ease of use, packaging it into a web app, and bringing variety to the artworks. Please join us in making this campaign happening and in organizing exhibitions in your own areas!

Also, keep in mind that our ultimate goal is to establish a free community center in Cameroon, Africa where we will organize Processing workshops, a chess club, and cultural activities. The country as a whole and the town that we are targeting has not been introduced to Processing, and there is no chess club either. We want to create a fun environment where the local community can come together and develop creative projects and learn critical skills for capacity and community development.

I could go on for pretty long about this project so please take a moment to check out our campaign, ChessMate, and you can respond to me directly here or via email: chessmate@kaleido.rocks.

Thank you so much for your time and I hope to hear from you!

Al

blindfish

This looks like a cool project! Chess is a great game. Processing is a great platform. And there's a worthy cause! But I haven't touched Processing code for a while: found my way back here recently looking at p5js (since work has led me to the dark side: JavaScript). I'd still be interested in contributing though: I read this post the other day and have had loads of thoughts on how I'd go about visually representing a game of chess. I appreciate of course that you may want help predominantly with some of the more mundane aspects of the code (e.g. documentation etc,) and I'd be interested in that too...

Do you have the source code hosted on github or similar; or how are you thinking people can contribute?

TribeOfLions

@blindfish:

Thanks so much for your interest in the project! As busy as I've been, I didn't put the code up on Github yet! This was especially since nobody had shown interest but I'm going to get on that ASAP!

In terms of contributing, any way that you'd be most interested is welcome. Indeed, I'd be thrilled to see visualizations of a Chess game that differ from my own artistic thoughts.

What I'll do now is set up the project on Github and list the things that need to be done and describe the vision I see for the project. I'll post the details back up here but it would be nice to contact you directly. Please feel free to drop me a message at al@kaleido.rocks or chessmate@kaleido.rocks.

Thanks for the encouragement and support and look forward to hearing from you!

TribeOfLions

@blindfish:

I've finally hosted the source code on Github.

TribeOfLions/ChessMate

I haven't written up a wiki yet but you can find an outline of where we want to head on our website. I will start writing up the wiki as soon as possible.

I look forward to hearing back from you and other Processing coders and I'm excited to see the different artworks that wll be produced. Our team will do everything we can to promote you and we're going to send every contributor we can closely collaborate with (up to 6) an 11''x11'' print on glass of one of their designs.

Again, please feel free to get in touch with me directly here or drop me a message at al@kaleido.rocks or chessmate@kaleido.rocks.

blindfish

I did some work on this project; but it's not getting any other contributions; at the moment not even from its originator: I sent @TribeOfLions a message over two weeks ago and have still had no response. Maybe he's on holiday; but odd to do that just when your IndieGoGo campaign is about to end :/

Anyway I figured I might as well share where I got to in the hope that someone else will be inspired to contribute: https://github.com/blindfish3/ChessMate

The code is dependent on Processing.js and uses a really neat JS chess library to do most of the heavy lifting: I've just written a crude interface to get the appropriate methods accessible from the ProcessingJS sketch tabs. For the time being you can paste in a single game in PGN format and play through the game, using the Board class to trace the position of pieces and visualise the chess game as you see fit; either as an animation or as a single rendered image.

I've deliberately tried to keep things flexible so as to not limit what can be done visually; and there's obviously still plenty of work to do: feel free to fork if you're interested :)