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# Generate tiny ominous landscapes with this procedural generation toy
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/generate-tiny-ominous-landscapes-procedural-generation-toy/
- Published: 2015-11-16T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2015-11-17T17:49:01.000Z
- Description: Mirror Lake is a strange little thing. Made in a week for Procedural Generation Jam, it creates static black-and-white landscapes, nestled inside a giant patterned bowl and suspended in space. Sometimes the space is dark, dotted with stars and the occasional sun or moon or comet; sometimes it’s a va
- Author: Chloi Rad
- Tags: News, algorithms, landscape, mirror lake, poetry, procedural generation, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-26 09:39

[*Mirror Lake*](http://katierose.itch.io/mirrorlake?ref=killscreen.com) is a strange little thing.

Made in a week for Procedural Generation Jam, it creates static black-and-white landscapes, nestled inside a giant patterned bowl and suspended in space. Sometimes the space is dark, dotted with stars and the occasional sun or moon or comet; sometimes it’s a vast white nothing, like a blank page.

The tiny scenes inside the bowl change too, sprouting branchless trees and rolling mountains across wide meadows, shining grey lakes, and bright white salt flats. A few times, I didn’t even get a landscape at all.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/previously/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/mirrorlake1.png)

I’d click away from a particularly full terrarium full of rolling black hills and clusters of trees and end up with what appeared to be a bowl of milk, floating in the void. I enjoyed these lonely scenes as much as the busy and the cluttered, especially when there was only one thing *off* about them: an empty vessel beneath a burning solar eye, a cluster of space debris descending down into a still black lake. They’re like little visual poems.

Each scene comes with its own sounds, which vary between the calm of a droning wind and the unease of a shrill, unwavering frequency. The combination of images and audio brings *Mirror Lake*’s little landscapes to life.

rich in texture and fine in detail

Creator Katie Rose is also behind [*picking figs in the ??????? garden while my world eats Itself*](http://katierose.itch.io/picking-figs?ref=killscreen.com), a poetry generator that makes use of several different algorithms and bots to craft bizarre and beautiful strings of text. You can download a collection of that project’s creations over on Rose’s [itch.io](http://katierose.itch.io/?ref=killscreen.com).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/previously/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/mirrorlake3.png)

Rose’s whole body of work, at least what’s available on itch.io, is as rich in texture and fine in detail as *Mirror Lake*, from a small, but particle-heavy arcade game called [*fishbugs*](http://katierose.itch.io/fishbugs?ref=killscreen.com) to the constantly regenerating multimedia engima that is [*inflorescence.city*](http://katierose.itch.io/inflorescence?ref=killscreen.com).

*Find these works and more on Katie Rose’s [official website](http://katierosepipkin.com/?ref=killscreen.com).*