Prompt 3: Describe how you played with the game.
Illusion was more than a piece of software, but really a form of play. Of course it was fun to make cool pictures at first, especially with the circular tool, just by messing around. It was satisfying to build circular tubes across the screen with that tool, reminding me of ones little animals will travel through. This all resulted in me being curious in the rules as there were obviously some consistent rules that the brushes/tools were following to choose their shapes and connection points.
I moved my mouse around, clicking and not clicking, trying up and down, various quadrants, even different speeds just in case. It often got pretty messy so I had to keep resetting the board, but I started to build a better mental model of the rules, and found myself wanting to create more than some complicated pipes. I love figuring out these kind of rules and the brushes presented are great for this kind of play, as they aren’t too challenging, but perhaps not obvious at first. For example, my favorite tool, the circle, had its height change depending on the y value of the mouse and the width change depending on the x value of the mouse. This enabled you to create relatively perfect circles along the xy diagonal.
With my bundled knowledge, I was finally able to put my art skills to the test, creating a pipe system, with support provided by the automatic lines from brush 1, and texture provided by brush 3. As I created them, I imagined them as water slides, and that made it all the more fun!