gamedesignjobs.de

I freshly started a new project, that will be most interesting for readers from Germany. At gamedesignjobs.de everyone can search or offer jobs or projects, related to gamedesign. You need a level-designer? No problem, post and find one. You got loads of work and need some graphic or music artist? Post a job-offer.

I just felt, that there was a lack on such a board in Germany, so I simply started it! Please help me spread the word, to make it a nice place on the web for people who love to make games!

Short notice: Old games, now on iPhone. Behind the scenes:

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Exotic stuff from Japan. Once again. Kuma-Uta (Bear Song) is a game, that was released on the Playstation2 in 2003, that is sort of… experimental… even in 2009-categories. It is about singing so called “Enka-Songs“. The bear gets answers from you on some questions (unfortunately my Japanese totally sucks, that’s why I really don’t know what they are about). The bear than “sings” his song based upon the answers, using a speech-synthesizer-engine. Totally awesome! Somehow bears begin to get my attention as gaming characters. Just have a look at Enviro-Bear, too.

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Two typographers (from Pleaseletmedesign) made an experimental typography with Toyota Belgium. They used the “Toyota iQ” car, four colored dots, cameras and Open Frameworks and a race car driver to make the typography. The font can be downloaded at iqfont.com.

As you might know, I totally like pixeleditors, especially, when they are stripped down to the bone. Fabu from Superlevel now digged something supercool. It is an online ANSI-Editor, where you can “draw” and “manipulate” “pixel”-images. If logged in, you can also save your results.

The editor is very rudimentary. You can not place a pixel “somewhere”, but have to “write” your pixels from left to right in each line. *Happy editing!!* Also to get a real pixel, you have to select text- and background-color the same. Otherwise you will just have colored text. Try Drastic out now! ANSI is the sister of ASCII, btw…

A new project, called Webbli-World, opened its virtual doors. It is a online-community for kids, but the colorful and lovely made world will also some eyecandy holiday for all the parents and… well… other grown-ups. I just made myself an account, too.

It’s got a fresh light sense, somewhere between contemporary character design (think Pictoplasma) and Spongebob. Also the soundeffects they used are very heartening. About the technical aspects: The whole projects was realized mainly with Actionscript 3 and the php/html/css/javascript/MySQL stuff. There is an in-depth post about it at Photon Storm. What is more to say? Ah, do they got posters to sell? I would love to dive into this world on my desk, too.

Well, most of the Indie-Games community already noticed, that there was an episode of “Into the night” airing on arte.tv. It is a one hour documentary, where reporters follow people “through the night”. Very well made. This time they met two game-designers in San Francisco: Jason Rohrer and Chris Crawford. Luckily could see the whole video yesterday. And it send me thinking. In short: Indie-games lack on storytelling on a deeper level, where good movies usually go, but (indie)games rarely. Well, just have a look at this snippets:

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