Project Summary

Tigerbob Mystery Garden is an interactive zero-player art game. Inspired by my knitting practice, jacquard textiles, antique woven tapestries, and video game dungeon maps, the project applies procedural generation to the artist's unique visual language.

Written in JavaScript and presented by Art Blocks Studio, the token hash is used to determine the Theme (color way) of the game and the first 24 tiles selected on the starting screen.

Explore the garden by using W, S, A, and D to scroll. (Press one of these keys to initialize the game first.) You can reset back to the starting screen by pressing 0.  

This artwork is paired with the HTML script & cashmere tapestry Undulation. 

This artwork is presented as a digital collectible (NFT). Learn more.

Check out the artwork and play the game on Art Blocks Studio.

About the Art

Tigerbob Mystery Garden was my first try at creating a literal “world” for Tigerbob. The project is inspired by top-down pixel video games like Zelda and Pokemon as well as traditional textiles like mille fleur and verdant tapestries from France. My work has been inspired by video games since  I was a child, and I was excited to debut my first attempt with p5js (JavaScript).

Tigerbob Mystery Garden is a zero-player game because it evolves based on its initial state. Keeping the project zero-player allowed me to focus on the aesthetics of the game rather than going deep into mechanics. When I made Tigerbob Genesis, I drew a collection of separate pixel designs which I reassembled into images. For this project, I wanted the viewer to get a sense of all the drawings I made in one experience. Scrolling in the garden generates new tiles according to a closed set of handwritten rules. This allowed me to create the sense of a vast world while allowing all tiles to be repeated in an orderly, and random, fashion. The random dungeon generation is inspired by wave function collapse used in many dungeon crawler video games.

Like my past projects Tigerbob Playing Cards and Tigerbob Genesis, Mystery Garden expands on the library of Tigerbob pixel assets and is once again informed by my knitting practice. Floral scenes were designed first in two colors, making every tile in this project able to be executed as a knitted output. The tile repeat is related to the size of the mylar sheet, cut in half, with larger “character” tiles consisting of two tiles stitched together according to my written rules. 

The project Undulation precedes Mystery Garden, sharing the tiles and serving as a base for the code for Mystery Garden.

Further Reading

TIGERBOB PLAYING CARDS - The second pixel Tigerbob digital collectible release upon this artwork is based.

MACHINE KNITTING - My background and purpose for using this process in my work.