The Parametric Engineering Christmas Tree Game!
You can play a live version of this game on Being Brunel:
The aim of the game is simple: Make some profit.
By dragging the black and white circular nodes you can (parametrically) grow the height of the tree, expand out the diameter of the bottom branches, increase the thickness of the trunk and alter the “fullness” of the leaves and décor.
As you push, pull and engineer the geometry of your tree will flash up, to give you an idea of the metre’age (or, indeed, kilometre’age) that you botany is achieving. If you feel confined by the current view you can zoom in and out using the (+) and (-) buttons on the top-right.
Once you’re happy with your design, hit the Remove the Scaffold! button on the top-left to, well, remove the invisible formwork and bring on a fullscale Eurocode 1-4 Gale. If you’re lucky your tree will still be standing, but if you’ve been a tad too ambitious you may well watch it fly across the sky; killing millions of innocents.
The results of your Christmas Tree engineering prowess will be shown. If your tree survived and you managed to turn a profit you’ll enjoy the green screen of chartership (BB-Eng, if you will), else you’ll face the red screen of shame. Click the red/green to return to your design and tweak to your heart’s content.
Some tips for turning a profit:
- Happy children demand more presents from the shops.
- Sad children sue you for emotional damage and don’t get their presents.
- Taller, more voluptuous, trees make children happier.
- The trunk is the most expensive part of the tree…
Have fun!
This Christmas Tree designer is a work of fun and employs assumptions so terrible that just listing them would be enough to discredit even Brunel himself. Therefore please do not attempt to substitute actual engineering design with this game; although I suspect if you’re the sort of person who had to be told this, you probably shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a construction project.
Challenger is primarily written by Thomas Michael Wallace (www.thomasmichaelwallace.co.uk), and released under the GPL v3 licence.