Gen Is A Particle Fighter That Has You Create Art As You Play

A group of Japanese students known as Yack Lab showed off a smartphone and tablet game called Gen during Tokyo Game Show’s Sense of Wonder Night (thanks IndieGames).

It has you maneuvering loads of particles around with your fingers to defeat enemies. As the geometric enemies move into the screen all you have to do is smother them in particles. You might do this holding your finger on the enemy or by using two or three fingers to create a shape with the particles to take multiple enemies out at once.

The idea is to encourage your freedom and creativity as while you’re defeating these enemies with the particles you’re also creative art. As you’ll see in the trailer above, the shapes that you make with the particles turns into part of the background, and over time this will form an image, adding colors to the outlines.

“Generative art organically combines mechanical elements based on an algorithm and calculation with many other different elements including random factors,” the students explain. “This means that, while works of such art are systematically created, they are unpredictable one way or another.”

A commercial version of Gen should be coming out soon. See more on its website.