Captain Forever is a silent space game with a simple gameplay: Shoot other ships and upgrade your own with the parts, the destroyed ships left over. A deep game, with a dense atmosphere. Fun. For the silent season of the year. (via)

The game Deflectorpool from the game- and tool-creator Tomas Pettersson is like a strange dream. It combines an interesting game-mechanic with oldschool demoscene or Amiga500 vibes. This one is hard too describe. You have to play it yourself. (via)

I’m totally not sure yet what to think of the new (and still beta) release of NodeBox 2 (located at this beta-site at the moment). It is once again GPL and build upon NodeBox. You can use Python-Scripts to generate “generative art”. Like the original NodeBox, that was Macintosh-only, NodeBox2 has the emphasis clearly on simplicity and quick and direct results. In this release they have two new main features. The first one is not really a feature in the deeper sense of meaning: It is available for Windows. The second: It’s got a graphical-editor, where you can combine modules in some sort of “maxMSP-style”. I just played with it a little bit, and can confirm, that this approach really leads to once again much quicker results, than tinkering with code only. Purist will also come to their right, because tinkering with code only is also an option. Well, let’s see how this new (kind of) user-interface will react with the output. I am totally in love with this plain simplicity of NodeBox1. Having too much of everything, and getting results too quickly is not always for the best. Let’s just wait and see what will happen.

Safari messes things up a little bit

I think it’s about font-width

Unexpected ways to use Twitter are always cool. And it seems, that a small group of people are doing graffiti-styled Twitter-explorations. Just check 140ARTIST at Twitter, look that the site 140art.com. Things are bottom up, that’s why everyone can contribute to this form of textart, by using the searchterm #140art or #twitterart at Twitter.

Update: Twingdings can come in handy…

Fanart can be really cool – if you begin to think it in different ways. Like this work here: It is a strange mixture of MegaMan-worship, an funny functional joystick (I guess, I hope) and a – for whatever reason – number pad plus a trackball. There are the MegaMan bosses build into the background-lit area. And it have some actionfigure (Sniper Joe) at the top. This thing is a tribute to MegaMan2 and has the beautiful name “in the year 20xx”. The creator of this very thing, just found the right words to describe his creation:

and ya, it’s quite big, I know… but why not!!!
I’m gonna rock it tonight!

See the whole process at the capcom-forum. (via)(via)

Ballgames, I love them! Sometimes. Especially, if they are decent and addictive at the same time. (I once tried to do the same genre with the game scnclr-X, so check it out). Balbodro is such a game, that looks simple, elegant, but has addictive qualities and by the way a really nice sound design. In order to “clear the screen” you have to select balls with the mouse. They fall to the ground and clear boxes of the same color. If all boxes are gone, you proceed to the next ground. (via Superlevel)

The AppStore is bringing math back again to game developers. Lately there we had Jeff Atwood thinking out loud, why setting the price to the lowest possible, 0.99 cent, is the best way to go for iPhone-developers. Adam Saltsman now takes the turn and doing math the other way round: If you sell a certain amount of games, a higher price might be better, just because revenues grow as sales grow. He writes the whole turn at Gamasutra:

The best case scenario here is that we’re all working from home and have cheap mortgages, and only need maybe $5,000 per month for living expenses (before taxes). We’re going to ignore health insurance and stuff like that for now too – very rosey best-case scenario! So, quick mental math, we need to recoup about $30,000 in net revenue just to break even, much less earn a little extra to put toward the next project.

So, let’s check out the bottom three pricing tiers (in USD only for sake of simplicity):

50,000 copies x $0.99 = $49,999 – 30% = $35,000

50,000 copies x $1.99 = $99,500 – 30% = $70,000

50,000 copies x $2.99 = $149,500 – 30% = $105,000

Which brings me somewhat circuitously to my main point: selling your game for $0.99 means you have to get in the top 10 to make it worth your while. Selling your game for $1.99 or more means you can get by and maybe even fund your next project even if you’re only in the top 100.

Simple math, isn’t it? What do you think?

(via)