Nintendo DS Touchscreen

Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: Levelediting on the Nintendo DS

Nice links and posts along the way. Critical Gaming Network wrote a short feature upon level-editors on the Nintendo DS. They praise the freedom, that the touchscreen brings, compared to making and editing levels with plain buttons. Word!

Editing terrain is like painting. Positioning units/players/enemies only requires a drag and drop. After designing levels for the original Advance Wars on the GBA, I’ve found the touch screen controls to be absolutely liberating.

Microsoft Kodu (formerly Boku)

At the CES 2009 Microsoft presented Kodu, a new interactive 3-D modelling tool to create, edit and modify 3-dimensional worlds. Kodu is meant as a teaching tool for kids, to learn game design concepts. It can be loaded straight to the Xbox 360 via the Community Games Channel. So it is not exactly a game, but as you can imagine, Microsoft wants a new generation of young people to grow up on Microsoft.

This whole thing just feels so… Microsoft. And I don’t know how many people now have to think of the way of editing things at little big planet. I highly recommend to read this excellent article about Kodu on Create Digital Motion. No real questions open after that.

Here we have an advanced technique in circuit bending stuff. The Madnoodler not only made evil circuit bending with toys and dolls, but also documented the process in the form of stop-motion videos. Also note the decent soundtrack on the videos!

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Ladies and gentleman. I am sure, that you already know Vague Terrain, a virtual magazine on digital art, culture and technology. They regularly compile some kind of virtual journal on certain topics, that are very up-to-date or ahead-of-its-time and deal in between cultural and technological shifts in the field of art, practice and culture. They for example had past journals on the “Rise of the VJ” or “Digital Dub“. Besides texts and theory, foremost works from artists find their place in this magazine. The recently released number 12 of Vague Terrain, about the hot topic Device Art. In December they asked me for a contribution and it didn’t took me long to just agree. Vague Terrain is just great!

As many of the fellow readers know, I do not only write at this place, but also over at Eggshell-Robotics. My contribution therefore gives an overview of traditional and most recent developments on devices that can be coded, bend or broken. The second part focuses on robotics, because this will be the next thing to come, for everyone involved into art and tinkering with stuff.

The next issue of Vague Terrain will be about “citySCENE”. The call for works just already started. Just take your chance!

I found this at Tiny Cartridge. Pretty much a long interview with Jeff Luke, who is the responsible art director for Scribblenauts, Lock’s Quest and Drawn to Life for the Nintendo DS.

The interview is divided into two parts (Part 1 / Part 2) and really leave no questions open – if you ever had questions about drawing, making and handling graphics for mobile or console development. Jeff Luke is the man, who does game design and art management at 5th Cell.

Scene from Scribblenauts

I highly suggest to read all of this interview. Some – maybe surprising quotes – should give you some extra-motivation to go through all of it. Jeff says on developing graphics for the DS:

“Well, one of the biggest things to keep in mind is the different brightness settings. You need to make sure your game looks good on all brightness levels which can sometimes be quite a hassle, but in the end, it’s the attention to detail that can make or break the experience for gamers. In conjunction with the resolution, screen real estate is a really big issue. You need to always be aware of exactly how much space you have on that screen at all times. Make a GUI sprite too big and you just end up having to redo it.”

“(…) we just make sure we create the original assets in high res and then scale down from there for in game art if needed. All of the portraits in Lock’s Quest started out as massive, multi-thousand pixel, full-body images of the characters that we then scaled down and took just the upper body portion of for the portraits.”

Scene from Drawn to Life

One of the leading netlabels of the “second era” of netlabels (about 2001-2004) was Tokyo Dawn Records. But they fell into deep sleep, missed to pay the bills for the website and the website got lost. Summer 2008 Tokyo Dawn announced, that they will come back again. Now they are slowly continuing the label. Most recently they announced, that all albums were uploaded to Last.fm – ready to listen to and download as well. Click there a little bit, the music is really great!

Les Miserables: Enter the Story

Chris Tolworthy is a class on its own. He finished his first game “Les Miserable” which is some like a first step of a broader concept “Enter the Story”, something Chris calls “world’s biggest adventure game”. Maybe I don’t get the genius of this game, or the game isn’t turned out to be that great yet. But before we get into the game and the really interesting concept, let’s talk a little bit about Chris himself…

Chris Tolworthy is the guy, who runs the biggest Zak McKracken archive on the web, where he collects every known fact under the sun about the Zak McKracken games. I spend hours and hours on this site, which is a good sign. It turns out that he is also a huge fan of Marvel comics and an advocate for “real-time in comics“. Some years ago he came up with the concept of “making the biggest adventure game of all time”, and I thought, well, yes, why not. This sounds interesting. If someone is capable of doing a really huge adventure game, than an adventure nerd like Chris. The whole concept he declares as “Enter the Story“

The project “Enter the Story” wants to transform epic literature into a huge gaming world. The decent goal is to create the biggest adventure game, that was ever written, with stories and timelines, that bridge each other with places and characters intersecting. Where you can walk seamless from story to story and from time to time. To get into the “Enter the Story”-project, he began to create his first game “Les Miserables”. He used the Aventure Game Studio to implement the “Les Miserables” book from Victor Hugo. So far so good. And this is where we are now.

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A carefully crafted game is on its way by Derek Yu, Mr. TIGSource himself. Even the name is kind of friendly: Spelunky!. It is the first game Derek made with the Game Maker tool. He writes on the forum: “Probably the easiest way to describe Spelunky is that its (kind of) like La Mulana meets Nethack – every time you play the levels, items, monsters, and so forth, are all procedurally-generated. And the terrain is destructible and there are quite a few ways in which the various game elements can interact with one another.”

What I read so far about the game was quite enthusiastic. The procedural design of the levels also will result an interesting play, re-play value. You also do not need to be an expert to detect the first class quality of the graphics. But you will need to have a play, to be convinced also of the playable qualities of Spelunky! Unfortunatelly I have problems in downloading the game. The download stops after downloadings some megabytes of the 11MB package for unknown reason. Someone maybe upload the game to a mirrorserver? That would be great!!