Tea-off was a design competition for tea-kettles. The winning entry One from design studio Vessel Ideation is a poetic combination of traditional style and a classic retro gaming thing. Just without being too clever or having too much surprises. You boils the tea / water directly on the stove. The vessel is white and when the blue pattern emerges, the tea is really. Lovely indeed.

One of the four vessels features a pattern with Space Invaders. The design looks not suited for hardcore-retro-gamers, but more for green-tea fans. What does this mean for our culture? Did the gamers grew older and decent? Or are the Space Invaders meanwhile a fit for classical designs, that will be here for ages?

(via)

Ahwww. Time F**k is an upcoming game, that will be released on the 1st September and I’ve never seen a game, so sad and happy at the same time.

The main character of this game is so adorable, despite (or just because) being so much of an unhappy creature. The poor existence is only made of some pixels with almost no colors, but is good at communicating the emotion. Well done.

“Time Fkuc is a game about perspective, growth and self reflection.”

More about the team at Edmunds blog. I think that power of three development teams can really work out good things.

Extra-paranoids will draw a line between this game and the works of Boris Hoppek.

(via)

A clever and sometimes really confusing concept has the game “Boxgame“. The playfield is a three-dimensional box. If you jump over the “cliff”, than you fall on the other side of the cube. Imagine it a little bit like a mix of a platformer, a puzzle game and a Rubik’s-cube. The game was made by Sophie Houlden and is extremely playable. For me as a player I sometimes do not understand the 3d-dimensional connections with all this twisting and turning, but I can just go out and play. But the level-designer was having a real hard time, to test things our correctly, I guess.

You need the Unity-3D-player installed to play the game, but the installation is far away from being a pain, so just try it out. The other games from Sophie look also very interesting.

(via)

A little “showreel” of indiegames in development.

“Indev” is the name of an interesting project. It is some sort of blog or archive for promising indiegames, that are currently in development. It should be a place for interested people, that can pick up projects, where the like to follow the development process. I think that being on this list would eventually increase the chance of finding sponsors and / or publishers. Or audience in general.

The project emerged out of a thread at in the TIGSource-Forum (read more here), that grew bigger and bigger and finally into a own project now. Lingering is fun, because most of the games there feature at least screenshots and very great graphics.

Over at the Flixel-board good thing are happening ultra-fast and in a reliable quality. Flixel is only some weeks out (read interview with Adam who did Flixel), but the community flourishing.

One of the highlights is FLAN, a tile map editor especially made for Flixel. This tool is still in alpha-version, but also proceeding ultra fast. It is free for personal use, but if you use it professionally, it is available for a really nice price below 10 dollars (read about software-pricing here).

Nitram-Cero, who wrote Flan, made a neat micro-game to promote his effort and show off some features. It is a mini-narrative and feature some very lovely wacky motion of the player-character. Play it here.

Late summer vibes. This means good weather and fresh ideas popping out of the heat. Like this one. Rumors go, that Hudson will release a Wii-game called “Shadow Tower”, that turns an stone old gaming-paradigm just the other way around. Objects throw shadows, and your aim is to use the shadow to cast the gaming character at home. With the help of a little butterfly, you can change the direction of light-source for managing special sections. So far, so good, now what?

At the Experimental Gameplay Sessions at the GDC 2009, Flashbang Studios presented a similar concept: turning the gameplay around, by using a gfx-by-product as a main source of play. Look at it here:

Anyway… Let’s turn around more gfx-by-products into main source of gameplay inspiration!

(via)(via)

The sounddesign idea of the day comes from a “physics lecturer from the University of New South Wales in Sydney”. He shows us on this impressive video, how you can make really, really awesome Star-Wars-like sounds, well, with low-budget equipment. He uses a “Slinky” (one of the best toys ever invented), a mic and a plastic cup to kick to best out of it. (via)