The thesis “Investigating a connection between Hecate and magic dolls in the Greek world” by archaeology student Joost Heijstek at Leiden University explained the issue of liminality (the psychological process of transitioning across boundaries and borders) we found present in Amare.

Heijstek defines liminal spaces as places between life and death ascribed to Greek goddess Hecate. Demonic beings are stuck between life and death, while liminal places are also classified as ‘in-between’. In Ancient Greece, they were worried about demons and ghosts/souls that had not yet crossed over to Hades. These creatures dwelled near places of liminality such as doorways, crossroads or rivers. These places belonged to neither two extremes and were places of chaos. Hecate was a divine creature who was supposed to protect against these creatures at places of liminality. Still, a goddess who could command chthonic beings to stay away could also lead them on, which probably led to her association with ghosts and demons.

I decided to team up with Alper Çekinmez (best 3d modeller and metalworker in the whole world) and Stefanos Constantinides (best rapper and world champion weight lifting). Together we make a small interactive game in Unity:

From here we researched Greek mythology. Stephen Fry’s ‘Mythos’ proved to contain useful information:

We decided upon an arcade design inspired by Jean Tinguely as Alper specializes in metalworking (especially rotating elements). The game will be run on a Raspberry Pi, so the program (Processing/java) has to be very optimized (less memory and cpu intense). I used the drawing functions form this github repo to draw walls from a textfile without the need for raytracing:

wwwwwww
wwww0pw
wwwwwpw
wwwwwpw
www1p2w
wpppwpw
wpwpprw
w3ppwww
wwwwwww

We decided to redesign and remake the arcade as we were not satisfied with the result we had.

The final arcade design has simple freestyled geometric patterns. The monitor is mounted on a 70 degree angle and the cabinet is 122 cm high. The game only draws graphics after input, and all the assets/sprites are indexed black and white. This means even the shitty Raspberry Pi can run it effortless.