Oh yes, Harmony with html5-canvas

I’m just digging just a little bit into html5-canvas object. Then I found a project, that should convince any critics instantly about canvas: Harmony from Mr. Doob. It feels light, is at a performant level (at least on my computer) and got a decent style. Just have a look at the page-source of the website. Scripting galore! Have fun with it! Here is a good cheat sheet, that should make the first steps into canvas easy.

Indie Game: The Movie in the making. This documentary should be released in Spring 2011, right now the creators Lisanne Pajot and James Swirksy are in the funding-phase: you can support this project by pledging at Kickstarter. The film should be about 14 indie-game developers, showing more the personal aspect of the game creators. The trailer shown here is some kind of featured demo, of what the film could look like. It is likely, that the documentary will include interviews with Flashbang Studios, Enemy Airship, Polytron, Team Meat (shown in the videotrailer above) and Infinite Ammo, since they already have footage from them. A great project, we are looking forward!

The collegues at CreativeApplications.net put out their first iPhone App SKTCH and freshly released a desktop-client for Mac OS X. SKTCH is a “generative draing tool”, where you can use 14 “presets” to draw pictures in a generative style. It is a simple thing on the i-touch devices, but with the new Max OS X App for the desktop, you can also edit, refine pictures you made on the i-devices (and also draw graphics from scratch as well). In order to do so, the sketch is send as .xml-file, that can be imported to the desktop app. We are curious, how the app will develop – or what to expect next from the, hm…, “Creative Applications Lab?!”.

For the technical interested: This whole thing was made with OpenFrameworks (which is great, but the app could need some performance tweaks, just as a sidenote).

There is also a flick-group of pictures, made with this SKTCH.

Revolutions is a contribution for the Experimental Gameplay Project, and it is solid made with a clear visual style. The game is basically a platformer, with the twist, that the levels are build into a 360-degrees landscape. With your ball you have the reach the exit of each level – sometimes with the use of switches, that moves platforms in the level-scape. As you can image – levelspace is limited in a 360-degree-landscape. The rotation pleasure is heightend by very well made music and sound, smooth gameplay and the good-looking levels with rich colors. Don’t forget, that this is only a prototype. But I wonder, how this game would be played iPhone, with doing all this rotation all the time…

Tweet Trumps is a game, that some of the web 2.0-enthusiasts implicit play for years in the social networks: who got the most followers, the best stats, the most postings etc. Finally Tom Scott and Dom Hodgson came up with a game, where you can play officially with Twitter-stats. Everyone knows trump from the childhood days. You hold your card and have to overbeat your opponent by picking a stat, that is guaranteed better than you opponents one (you surely not know). A little fun game, not too deep, but with millions of variants, by picking special themes for the game, like cars, buildings, tv-series, etc.. Twitter Trump is the most dynamic and interactive version of this game.

Just start entering a nickname of your choice, wait some seconds and try to beat your opponents cards with followers, word-length or tweets-per-day. The cards are generated by friends of the twitter-account you selected first. Definitely worth a try. Game of the week, i want to call it.

The game “Hue Shift” look much easier, than it really is, because the gameplay is based on color-switching while climbing the stage. A perception, we usually not are that trained in. “Climbing the stage”-games because very popular, at least with the success of of “Doodle Jump” in the iPhone. Now Hue Shift brings in some creative shift into the somehow not very spectacular genre of minigames… (if you want to call it a genre in itself). (via)

Coptra

Neo-retro is cool without any doubt. And if there are helicopters involved, they are much more cooler. Take the first game Coptra, ready to play in the browser. In this scanline-styled game you have defend your helicopter against tanks, rockets and other, typical retro-like heavy armor. This sounds easy, but is not. Even surviving some seconds can be a challenging experience. You play with mouse and cursor-keys. Awesome! (via)

Party-Boat

Party-Boat is like the title suggest with a little dose of humor in it. It is a 2009-game from messhof, where you play also a helicopter. Once again you have to survive rockets, that are fired from a military boat. The party aspect in this game: try to fly loopings with the heli to activate score multipliers. How cool is that?! The style is a little like 486-vintage PC. The soundtrack is scrammed, but also cool. Yay, let there fly helicopters!