A very nice game idea had the people at Booblebrook. “Coign of Vantage” is a puzzle game, where you have the rotate a 3-dimensional object. With the mouse you have to find the right perspective, because the colored fields, that are dispersed in that “virtual 3D-box” are a pixel image. And you can see it, if you rotate that cube into the right perspective. A mouse only, no click game. The 3D-logic somehow also reminds me on Fez.

For me the game lacks some gameplay-tweaks to be a long term entertaining one, but idea and implementation are good. Try to make the sounds it plays, when you rotate the cube, for yourself “whoo-whoo”. It’ll gonna be fun.

The game starts in a browser with flash, so you are only one click away. “Coign of Vantage” by the way means something like “the right advantageous position for oberservation or action”, but in oldschool and very complicated English.

Since weeks I am thinking about writing about this topic that really caught my interest. It’s about videos, that are really cheap in production, mostly even have a “lo-fi” aestetic as well, but nevertheless convince because they have the power of a good ideas, charima or funky tweaks, that make the difference. The begin of this new series on Digital Tools will make DJ Kawasaki.

The clip “Bright like Light”, well, basically does not show anything more that the singer itself at different places, singing her song. Nothing really special and really a classic in making music videos. Even the locations are nothing special. Mostly walls and things like that. The lack on original content or special places is totally replaced by the charisma of the singer and the natural vibe she spreads.

Just look at the video: production budget? Not very high. But I really liked that clip. You can make a clip like that also at home with standard equipment. And since we are living on a webvideo-age, also very high picture quality is needed not to convince the customer.

I am working on the third incarnation of my loved pixeleditor Smoove. The first version did I code on the Sony PSP using PSPLua. On a PSP with homebrew equipped, you are able to pixel on the go and save the results as bmp-file on memory stick.

That was nice, but performance limited due to Lua. Back in that days I obtained myself an Nintendo DS and was very passionate about homebrew on the DS. It was more like: “A pixeleditor right? Let’s make use of the stylo + touchscreen-bonus!”. My idea was to make Smoove DS a full-grown on-the-go application for doing tilemaps, sprites, animations and gamemaps. Unfortunately I began having troubles with reading and writing files. And what’s the use of making artwork, without the ability to save? At least I liked the usability of setting and playing with the pixels.

Go with the flow.

Three weeks ago to began, giving Smoove a third chance. This time my decision was, to use the power of the web to get things going. I use a combination of Ruby on Rails and ActionScript / FLEX. The thing you are able to play with Smoove Online at the moment is the very first release. You can draw tiles, edit palettes, shift and flip the tiles. The best feature is, that you can import and export the graphics you made in a simple markup-format. With this you can exchange graphics with friends, beloved ones or co-workers in a straightforward style. You can also change the size of the canvas with the import, play with it a little. If you like, there is a newsletter available. Subscribe to get the latest news upon the development of Smoove. There is much room for improvement! The next thing I want to implement is reading and writing the data to files – so the same obstacle the Smoove DS failed upon. Wish me luck.

UPDATE:
The Smoove-project lives on under the name HiScore Pixeleditor on iOS.

Whoohoo! This game is really fun! The subject of Dino Run game is easy. You play a young dinosaur, while the world is going to die. Your mission is simple: run as fast as you can, just to escape the doomsday.

The graphics are very fresh and pixely in style. The gameplay is somewhere between games like moon-patrol or motorcross maniacs, so expect something far away from the obvious, that is still much of fun playing! Once again a really good work from Pixel Jam.

Run my friend, run!

Ok, this is not 8- or 16-bit. At least it’s 2-dimensional.

I have found the spritestitch-blog and the spritestitch-forum, that brings good pixelized retrorism into analogue playgrounds.

It’s a place on the web dedicated to the art of stitching, knitting and crafting the 8- and 16-bit era of sprites in computing games. Make the world a better place, by stitching your favorite characters. Girls, now you have a reason for playing this good old games with your boys. And boys… time to get into the art of stitching and 2d-art again. At least to sit by tea and cake, craft and listen to the wisdom of the elderly. One last question remains… what is so cool about retro-characters? Well… I can’t tell you exactly, but this week some PacMan made my day.

Analogue innovation in leveldesign.

PS: Did you know? They collected how-to make patterns and tools on their site!

A really good idea had Logan Williams. He made a “tangible audio sequencer” using a cam, paper and coins. The sequencer module in the computer scans the paper with the webcam and detects objects on the paper (in this case the coins). They are interpreted as data, that you normally put into a digital sequencer using the mouse.

A dead simple idea, why nobody else did something like that before?

Update: Logan gave me the URL of his official website, and he seems to like it complicated and unusual. His portfolio is available under http://47Ω.com. And if this doesn’t not work, just try http://xn--47-fcc.com.

Fellow people! We got something to laugh! The Eegra webcomics are about gaming and related stuff. And they are funny, crazy and well… mad?

Some example, just to get you going.

Mr. Fun. Watch the whole.

Highly recommended also this and that, that one and this one.

Thanks (tigsource!).