Monday, June 6, 2011

Jellybots: Biin


"woogly woogly woogly," it seemed to say.

I got my Jelly back! :D

This is Biin (pronounced like 'bean'). Another based-on-a-friend character from the Jellyverse. Expressions on the right, a few alternate forms on the left.

She's one of the Candyman's first experiments in alternative-intelligence (they get upset when you call them artificial). She's the only AI in The Soup that isn't a proxy (controlled by a grown-up operator).
Biin doesn't exactly follow orders; In order for The Soup to accept an inhuman intelligence, she had to be programmed with a significant amount of childlike anti-reason. Like all of the suits, hers is malleable and adaptive...incorporating new information into her physical form as fresh matter is introduced to the Jelly.
She just learned 'hands'. She's pretty excited about them :)

She took me longer than I'd like to admit. The thing I've been challenged by (and excited about) with Jellybots, is that I spend a lot more time coming up with the concept than I do with rendering it out. The simplicity can be deceiving...she went through a number of weirder, wilder iterations before I settled on the above design as her default-state. The idea is that she'd be able to change pretty wildly according to the situation. I'm not saying I'm 100% on this design...but I think it has the spirit I was trying to capture :)

Hope you like her! Name, details, and design are all up for change...so let me know if you have feedback!
Also, if you're confused about all of the things I mentioned earlier in this post: good. I haven't been very forthcoming with details about the Jellybots story, because it's still totally up in the air! So you haven't missed anything. I'm trying to confuse you with sudden detail on purpose :p

Hooray for summer!

Much love,

-n

PS. The design. process. is. complex. :p

5 comments:

Daniel M. Bensen said...

Ooh. First comment. All right. I like the name (sounds like Japanese onomatopoea, but I checked and it doesn't seem to be). I So what are the advantages of using an Alt-I rather than a proxy? And the Soup sounds like...an alien nanotech swarm, maybe self-replicating silica bugs in a petroleum matrix. The bugs communicate by radio signals, and when you get enough of them together, they achieve sentience.
These ones are cooperating with humans because...they're eco-terrorists! Like Green-peace, they violently object to their government's plans to mine the earth for resources (killing humanity in the process), and so they are lending us their powers to help defend ourselves.

Nicholas Kole said...

hahaha...well, I wasn't going to say anything...BUT: The Soup is (kind of) a...place. :D
Aaaaand there won't be aliens per-se in Jellybots, I don't think. Not space-aliens anyways.
YooOOOoOoOo'll seeeeee...

(fun speculation, though! :D)

Anonymous said...

I love Biin...perhaps she's a bit autistic like your sister's doggy, Zoey? I love the expressions which include the punctuation! Verrrry clever...I may need to borrow it! As she is discovering "hands"...can she do a bit with "I have a face"...since that incorporates heavy flailing of hands?! Yo-mama

Daniel M. Bensen said...

So they aren't aliens? Oh well. The Soup is a place? Huh. I bet some philosophers think of it as more of a state of mind. :)

baby sister said...

Neat.










I'm still reading, sometimes ;)