The weblog True Chip Till Death got an in-depth interview with Oliver Wittchow, the very creator of the Nanoloop-gameboy sequencer. Oliver tells some very interesting things about the history and the making. I want to highlight some “magic things”, that are also remarkable for the locally interested people. He speaks about the first public performance of Nanoloop:
The first public performance I did with Nanoloop was in spring 1998 at a ‘lo-fi contest’ at the Liquid Sky club, Cologne. I started selling it in late 1999, initially only within Germany. Worldwide sales began in 2000.
You eventually know Pixeljoint. A great community for making and sharing pixelart. They do challenge or competitions on a regular basis and it is somehow a duty for me, to point you to that recent one, that has just finished. The topic was “twenty years of GameBoy”. The challenge was about creating “Mockups” of virtual GameBoy-games that nobody did (so far).
The results are absolute charming, since the origial GameBoy only used 4 levels of grey. You can vote or check out the forum-thread with all submissions. Another good overview of the best contributions can be seen at the weblog Randomrocket. Pixelart will live forever!
What would be the web, if an fresh idea you had would not been already realised by someone else? Welcome Tweetcoding! This is a little contest, where you have to “code in 140 characters or less” of ActionScript-code in order to fill an Flash-applet with life. The first round was already finished with some very decent results.
g.clear();a=mouseX;b=mouseY;c=++i%8/8+10;d=(i&8)<<4; for(j=64;j--;){ls(c*=1.1,d-=0x50580); g.drawCircle(a=5+a-a/50+s(i/16),b=5+b-b/50,c)}
Tweetcoding-Winner piXelero. Check out the result.
Where to start or go to from there?
- Visit the tweetcode-website and check out the first contributions.
- Read about the rules.
- Read the initial announcement.
- Don't forget, that there is also a Tweetcode-Minifier available.
- Let there be Tweets!
Last not least thanks to DjMike for this hot hint! Somethin' somewhat similar is Tweet-A-Sound for MAX/MSP-users.
Rrola – Ameisen (32 bytes, MS DOS, 2007)
Well, Goto80 curated some sort of demo-showcase, dedicated to visuals with less than 256 bytes of space (less than a SMS-message). He says about it:
HELLO DID YOU KNOW? People make visuals that are smaller than an SMS (256 bytes). Since they are not recorded video, they can be changed any way you wish. It is maybe the opposite to all the things that everybody loves to hate: software updates, über-consumption, compatibility, inefficiency, recording, the illusion of the universal computer, and so on. (…) To me these are ideal examples of wo-man-machine interaction, where media materialism meets software magic. Stop recording!
Totally agreed. Read more at Chipflip.
Social Demo’ing on Twitter?
Oh, if we are already on this topic. Did you know, that Twitter features less than 140 characters? It – at least in theory – should be possible without a problem, to use this fancy web-thingy in order to exchange full demos and have this fast updates and community thing also going on. If found some mysterious first approach like this, at the twitter-account of emoc.
Update: Found an interesting article on the birth of the 160 character limit at SMS-text messages.
Music video of “Robot High School” by “My Robot Friend”. Is this arcade-game inspired stuff? Or is it just me? (via)
Hell, I love modifications of classic games, especially Space Invaders. I even made one myself years and years ago. But this here is different, because it turns Space Invaders into a two-player game. One of the biggest drawback of space invaders is the repetitive nature of the round-based play. You won’t run into that one in this game.
There are two player-sprites. Player one sits on the bottom, while player two on top of the screen. Now both can battle the space invaders, but it is more likely, that they will battle each other. Get the game here. (via)
