Merging music with a game-controller! A nice experiment by @sidebrain. He build a Max for Ableton Live patch (screenshot) around a original NES controller. This device can now be used to play really lovely music. The nice thing it, that he also managed to control games with this “music making device” at the same time. Useless to say, that his “music movements” within the game are some sort of charming ridiculous. And it’s great!
There is a new app for the iPad available, that aims at “learning openGL ES 2.0” on the iPad, called Shaderific (AppStore Link). It features an editor, where you can code your shaders and a presentation mode – to enjoy your results. In other words: it is another app, where you directly code and test and code on your iPad! Somewhat the counterpart app of for example Paragraf for iPad. The app is designed very straightforward and you will get results and playing with code within minutes. I am curious, if there are mind-blowing updates coming for this app later on.
Suddently Germany has two new game-magazines! The first one is the WASD Magazine. It deals about “Texts about Games”. It is an essay-magazine, that should be released about every 6 month in a small addition. The format is a mix of magazine and book. Content is about culture of games, game-reflections and everything else, that the gamer wants, but does not find in the “review-gaming-zines”. The design of the magazine is very clear and looks like a “want-have” product. Yes, what have!!
The second new kid on the block is the “Spielplatz Magazine“. It’s subtitle is “Games for Everyone” and its approach remembers me instantly on the GEE Mag. Compared to the WASD Magazine, Spielplatz only comes in a digital format: that is the AppStore (for iPhone and iPad) and web-based. The content is about games, new games, culture of games and anything else related to that culture. Welcome!
Small tile-map-jam I made yesterday in under 30 minutes
Ever struggled making decent tile maps for your small game project but not wanted to ask or hire an pixel-artist? Then this here is for you! It is simply one of the best tutorials on “how to make pixel-art” that I’ve ever read. The magic of this tutorial is, that you you learn how to make real “edges” to your basic, loopable tiles.
Just head over to tileset-tutorial. Everything is much better explained there, than everything I could write here. This tutorial was written by Blackmoon Design andy published at Wildbunny-blog.
The art and research group “And-Or” from Switzerland released another interesting concept-game. Piksel Bacteria deals with Augmented Reality and the real world.
The concept is easy (and maybe not a game at all) – your mission is to “infect” as many pixels as possible with the “bacterium pikselum”. The bacteria breed, by looking at them with the iOS-camera. Give them food by taking them to an edge and start moving the camera along the edge. What I like about this concept is, that you do not need any QR-Codes or something other prepared, to step into the “Augmented Reality”-world, but that the “game” plays instantly from any phone in any environment.
Before “Piksel Bacteria” And-Or raised gameplay and reality questions in works like “Gamescape“, where the players input of the game results in architecture. Or Discrimination Pong, a work that raises questions about gameplay modifiers, asymmetric gameplay and discrimination.
Just stumbled upon this animated version of the still great book / project “How to survive a robot uprising by Daniel H. Wilson. It explains in shot, how to act on robots, if they get really hostile and out of control.
File-size still matters. Even in 2012. The JS1K is a demo-competition for doing amazing stuff in web browsers with JavaScript just under 1k in size. There is basically nothing more to say, but better just visit the site and browse the submissions! You can study the submissions-code as well.
