Back from holidays, and directly a cool announcement to make: In August (6.-9. 8. 2010) the BIGJam invites us to jam along a whole day and night about games, games and games. “BIGJam offers programmers, designers, artists and musicians from around the world a chance to work together on exciting independent game projects in a relaxed, creative environment.” It’s an “opportunity to get together in one place and collaborate on exciting and, hopefully, absurdly inventive projects“. The event is also a change, to get qualified feedback from gaming-enthusiasts on own project, or to listen to talks about various topics (including programming and making music – such things…)

Get all, all information about the BIGJam 2010 in the TIGSource-forum. Unfortunately the ticket-system says, that all amounts of available tickets for the BIGJam are already sold out.

Goto80 is keep on doing really strange stuff with electronics, especially old computers and customized software. This work is a “Re-destruction of the Dutch national anthem”, he wanted to perform at Hacking at Random 2009. It was somehow dedicated to the Bits of Freedom, the civil rights organization from the Netherlands. Goto80 point out in his blog about this piece:

Unfortunately I got sick and couldn’t attend, but this is the video of the rehearsal. The software is Defmon, and you can’t copy it. Not so much improvisation in this one, except for the trashy solo at the end, but I’ll post more of those things later on.

I do not want to rate the music, because anthems in any or another way are always a little bit of hardcore. But Goto80 understands to mix a dark and gloomy atmosphere, with extraordinary “hacker moods” and very exotic software and processes. The whole thing just looks, if it wants to explode the next second.

Jenova Chen of ThatGameCompany talks in this interview about some of the design strategies, he found in making games. A small, but enlightening talk, that makes us curious about the upcoming onlinegame “Journey”, that will be released on the Playstation Network. (via Attract Mode / Nobuooo)

This video shows incredible 190 indie-games, that are currenty in development. Compiled and collected by Pixel Prospector. At the site are also much more infos about each single game.

“Beet Fleet” is the name of a work, that was made Filip Kostovic as a result of the Bachelor course of studies Game Design 2010 at the HdK Zürich. The sort of game uses two turntables as input devices, that controlles the action on the z- and x-axis. The visuals are abstract and strong, with parallels to Tron or Rez. The longer I think about this, the more it seems, that Beat Fleet is a consistent extension of the basic idea of Rez, taking real “analog” hardware controller into account. Will DJs keep on playing games in the future at work? Also check out the other works, they all look interesting. (via)

A great animation-short, that sets the planet Mars into the right angle. The sound-effects of that one are really intese. Made by Joe Bichard and Jack Cunningham. (via)

Processing-lovers will quickly get into Algorithm Ink. It is a port of ContextFree, Algorithm Ink uses the still new Canvas object to create graphics in a generative way. With right click you can save the picture. After hitting “edit” – for example in the gallery – you can view and edit the source code. It’s the fun that is in open source. The syntax of Algorithm Ink looks a little bit like Basic meets Java. Here, I found an introduction-video as well:

The project is over two years old now, but still beautiful to work and play with. A little bit like Nodebox, but browser-based and JavaScript-powered.