Today I finally had the time to take a deeper look under the hood of the Flixel game-framework for Flash/Actionscript. My opinion? Highly recommended! Not only the mini-game “Mode“, that ships with Flixel, is a great one, but also all details of the source-code is well balanced and implemented in a professional way. You just need two hours to pop into game-development, even if you have only little understanding of developing games and Actionscript-code.

Screenshot from the example-game “Mode”

At Flixel you work with “states” and can add Sprites and Text to the states. There are also some handy halpers for doing animations as well, for example particle-systems. Things, game coders should instantly be familiar with. Here is the documentation.

Let’s look at a simple sprite object. Everything is implemented: health system, physics, animation handling, collision handling. It’s all there and it feels just right.

I do not know, how to best express my initial love for this tool.
A) It is open source.
B) It is possible, to extend it every time on your own for your projects.
C) It can be used for any project you like.
D) Even the preset-stuff that ships along is great.
E) There is a well maintained support-forum at Flixel.org, and I am sure, that it will grow into a community. Leaving one question open: Why pay for other tools? Flixel also integrates seamless into the free open-source code-tool (IDE) FlashDevelop.

Friends, I got a new toy to play with! Thanks Adam for this brilliant Flixel.

Update: I made an Interview with Adam Atomic about Flixel.

A short, but interesting platformer experiment is “Sad Torino Girly Harry” from beef and cow. It was made for the “Poppenkast 3 hours astronaut” competition. Aim was to make a space-game in 3 hours and mention the cast. The game is as confusing as its name – experimental in nature and really worth 3 minutes of playing fun! Get the game here.
(via)(via)

Cologne Commons Compilation Vol. 2

In less than four weeks our first conference and festival on free music, creative commons and new cultural markets – the Cologne Commons – will take place in Cologne (12. – 13. June 2009). It will feature an exhibition showing ten years of netlabel-culture, an conference, where media-experts and musicians from Germany will talk about the changes and chances of the ongoing cultural and technological shift. At night of this two days a full equipped festival program will showcase music-talents from all over the world, who use the internet successfully as tool and promotion platform. At least, they are good at their instruments, too!

To celebrate and to give a tribute, we released a second mp3-compilation with tracks from artists, that will play at the festival. It contains music from Rktic, Goto80, Comfort Fit, Entertainment for the Braindead, Backwater Planet and more. Be sure to check it out. Head for a listen and a download at the Cologne-Commons website. Feel free to spread the word. Little more info in English here.

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)

Lawrence Lessigs latest book “Remix” is freely available as a download. I want to suggest this great read especially for people, who are interested in new economies, that are about to come. Lessig speaks of “hybrid” and “parallel” economies, that will embrace free sharing of knowledge, contribution and works, as well as commerce in certain parts. Things I often thought about in the last weeks: some sort of “hybrid economies” as opposed to “gift economies” or “full control commerce”. From the book, page 225:

The simplest but perhaps most important conclusion is that parallel economies are possible. Work successfully licensed in a commercial economy can also be freely available in a sharing economy. If this weren’t true, then there would be no commercial record industry at all: despite the war on file sharing, practically every bit of commercially available music is also available illegally on p2p networks; this “sharing” has not been stanched by either the war against it waged by the recording industry, or the Supreme Court’s declaring the practice illegal.
Yet despite this massive sharing, according to the recording industry’s own statistics, sales of music have declined by 21 percent. If parallel economies were not possible, that 21 percent would be 100 percent.

Also read my review on Gulli (in German).

Windosill does look interesting. This flash-based game is a point and click adventure, but it made the jump from being a collection of ideas to being a world full of riddles, possibilities and atmosphere. Think of games like Loom or Samorost. I even identified elements from Little Big Planet. Similar to the former games Feed the Head or Arcobots, the narrative is on an abstract level. Exploration and surprises are the thing you mainly will do, compared to use logic in order to solve riddles. The graphics are plain, clean and mostly blue, just like the other games from Vectorpark. The animation are very smooth and delicate. If you are into surrealistic worlds, subtle sound effects and well done animations, you should give this game a try. Just download this pleasure. There is also a full version available, costing only 3 dollars, so go for it! Read more about it at Jay is Games.
(via Torley)

PS: Check out other recommended game-content on Digital Tools.

Glum Buster is a strange jewel. You will need a little time and patience to explore the world of this game. It is even hard to describe, what type of game it is. It contains elements of many different kinds of games: puzzle, adventure and a little shooting. Game-elements are crafted carefully, leaving a path of strangeness behind. One possible comparison would be eventually Leisure Suit Larry or the other old games from Sierra, because the overall goal of the game is to collect xxx of 275 points. The rest is up to you.

The game “Glum Buster” also seem to have a little bit of an interesting history. It took four years in the making. The developer Justin Leingang (aka CosMind) was only involved in a little community, foremost the EO-community, that always release extremely interesting indie-titles. About the game Justin says, that it is “a collection of my constant, thick-as-brick daydreams”. Can be simple as that. In an interview with GameSetWatch he said something really, really interesting:

“Glum Buster was primarily inspired by the initial play mechanics of the prototype that I built. From there, bizarre as it may sound, it was continually inspired by itself. I was constantly fueled by the development of each component – be it play mechanics and dynamics, graphics, sound effects, functionality, etc. As a result, inspiration begat inspiration. It was a pretty gratifying reciprocal process, really.”

Sounds cool, huh? Let’s check out the game. Head over to the Glum Buster website.