not an island is a game created by Alex Goss’s Fall 2021 Time Studio students. Groups of 4-5 students created a landmass and biome using free and open source software. Groups were challenged to synthesize or grow a biome from a “seed” or “spore”. Students were asked to consider the seed’s history and the history of the land surrounding it, as well as its impact upon the land surrounding it, as a colonizer, decolonizer, destroyer, or healer.
All aspects of the 3D world, including the seed, are built from 2D images pulled from the physical world and processed to become 3D forms and textures. To create the seed object, dozens of pictures of a found or sculpted object were reconstructed to form a solid digital object. The island’s topography is generated from a flatbed scan of a found or sculpted object; the terrain is made from 4 different textures tiled from flatbed scans of surfaces; plants/rocks/debris are also made from cutouts of flatbed scans also from found objects.
not an island is playable on Mac and PC. You can download the game here.