I just found this one, looks pretty nice: Morph by Skylined. It’s an ASCII-animation in the browser, using JavaScript to animate the contents. On that occasion I found some interesting things on that site. For example this cracktro-remakes in Flash. Ready to watch in the browser, too! Uh, holy… There is a complete site dedicated to Flashtros! Flashtro.com.

Did you already heard of Kickstarter.com? This is still a fresh project. There you will be able to suggest a project and ask for “community-driven-funding”. If enough people are willing to spend money on your project, you get the money and have to realise the project. Can be easy as that.

The guys from Crystal Labs now reached the funding goal of 1.500 dollar for their game “High Strangeness“. It will be a “12bit action / adventure video game” and the project looks very promising. Crystal Labs is run by the same people, who make the STFUAJPGM-podcast. The music will come from chipmusic-wonderkid Disasterpeace. Head over to this blogentry, there are three of the music-pieces available, that will go into the game-production.

What should I say? Lego-animation and extremely uplifting chip-sounds. I suppose this is not an animations, but pure Lego-work. The YouTube liner-notes go: “1500 hours of moving legobricks and take photos of them.” Hard work, hard fun to look at. Made by Rymdreglage (via)

I spotted an interesting article about the history of some of the biggest or most famous game-companies in the world like Capcom, Ubisoft or id Software. The article focuses on concise facts, that set the course for amazing developments, that lead to some of the best and most important games and therefore changed the world. Maybe call it fate. A compact history of the game-market. Worth reading!

I think many of you still remember the “Million Dollar Homepage“, where some clever guy made a webpage, consisting basically and of a graphic, consisting of one million pixels. He sold the whole thing on a pixel-based basis and made a million bucks in total.

Well, history is repeating. Sort of – in other form. Some other guy now started the same concept, but for ASCII characters. It’s just the same principle, but with ASCII/ASCII-art (not ANSI!)… The site is still fresh, but it seems to work well until now. Wu Zhe, running the site, says, that he wants to finance his startup with the million he made with this site. It went online only 5 days ago, but he already has some sales. He writes in his blog:

I can’t believe I got my first sale only 6 hours after this site went online, though it’s only one character. Guess which char it is, it’s an “@”!

Go to the ASCII Million Dollar page.

(via, thx!)

Fig.8 is an unusual browser-game, with poetry at places, you wouldn’t expect. In Fig.8 you play a bike, that drives around in some sort of classical book, filled up with “figures”. That sort of technical drawings, books used to have in the pen and pencil era. Well, there is basically nothing more to say here. Best you experience the game by yourself, because all words are wasted here, trying to describe this experience. Only one click away! So play Fig. 8. The game was made by Intuitiongames.

At Intuitiongames we also find some interesting background about the game:

At first Fig. 8 was actually called US and it was an art installation. In my junior year of college I was walking in the snow one night and I noticed some bike tracks running through the snow; an unusual scene in the middle of winter. While I walked along I noticed the two paths diverging then returning to a single unified track, it made me think about how relationships change over time how we grow distant then return.

(via)

The Cologne Game Lab has opened. Really fresh news, send to me by Krystian Majewski (he twitters as well), who is co-writer of the great Game Design Scrapbook-blog and also part of this lab. The site design is somehow fresh (and unlucky me I am just right at the moment working on a new site with almost the same colors).

The direction of the lab is interdisciplinary research on a bigger scale, as well as practice-near research, also for single companies. They also offer a “Master in Game Development & Research”. In addition they are planning workshops and seminars for creative talents already working in that field. The lab is attached to the KISD and the FH Köln. In other words… this sounds massive and like perfect timing. I am curious of things to come.