bellwoods

about

Bellwoods is an art game for mobile & desktop that you can play in your browser. The concept of the game is simple: fly your kite through fields of colour and sound, trying to discover new worlds.

Bellwoods (named after Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto) is inspired by Haiku poetry and the desire to capture a fleeting moment in a single breath. The experimental game provides a brief moment of calm—allowing our mind to wander aimlessly like an untethered kite drifting through the air.

Like Haiku, the game is an exercise in minimalism: stripping away the non-essential and leaving audiences with only a fragment of a larger experience. These ideas are also encompassed within the underlying architecture of the game: all of the graphics and audio is generated procedurally on the fly, allowing the entire application to fit under 13 kilobytes of computer storage (roughly six times smaller than the storage capacity of the first-ever floppy disk from 1971).

credits

Bellwoods was designed, conceptualized and coded by Matt DesLauriers.

Thanks to Mélissa Hernandez for coming up with the name and providing other contributions on this project.

Special thanks to Vector Festival for showcasing this project in their online exhibition, Local Host: Post-Human Media Arts.