Most entertaining way, to quit the dayjob
Indie-developer Farbs from Australia quit his job, to head for full-time indie-game-development. So far eventually not a new or interesting story. But the way he quit, is some kind of interesting, proving his gamedesign-skills in heart and action: We wrote a sort of “Mario clone game”, that delivered the message to his boss. Good job! Just have a play or read the original blogpost. (via)
People at the “Art and Genomic centre” in the Netherlands are working on a new kind of display-technology, that is driven by organic lifeforms: fluorescent bacteria. Huhh. It is part of the “Artist in Residence” program, and people from the Waag society Fablab seem also to be involved.
At least this really, really looks cool. They have an own blog, reporting about their latest developments. If there are breakthrough, then they’ll report it on the blog I guess.
Once again I found a very beautiful video. Almost ten minutes of bliss. The video got a very simple idea, but is full of creativity. Enjoy!
PDSounds.org is a new project, that can come in handy, if you are last minute searching sounds for a production. Compared to projects like the “Freesound-Project” all sounds on PDsound are dedicated to the Public Domain, so they are totally free of rights – compared to the Freesound, where the sounds are creative-commons-based and you at least have to give credits. Resulting in extra-work at the very end of the project.
So far the sound I discovered on PDSounds are very rough, not very precise, polished or special and still require extrawork to sound well. But maybe the quality of sounds will achieve a new level in some months or years.
I think the archive will be good to get inspired, or to linger around. The sound there are tag-based so exploring is possible. Also browsing the archive by user is given as an option, as well as a “sound chart” and a forum to get in touch.
All this is very fine. But in the end… recording own sounds is quite much more fun after all. (via)
Commodore and Apple: Late love with obstacles
C64iPhone is a full C64 emulator, that is even officially licenced from Commodore Gaming. You can play all the vintage games with it. It comes initially with five games at the moment. So here’s the website. But there is more to this story.
I was wondering, why nobody else did this thing before, C64 on the iPhone. It seems, that several people tried to do a port of the Frodo-emulator for the iPhone SDK sufware emulator – just for the fun of doing it. According to reports form Touch Arcade and Pocket Gamer a developer from Manomio also worked on this project, but later rejected it because
a) there the licences from Commodore were unclear and
b) the terms of the iPhone store would not allow a project like this.
But the itch under the fingernails stayed.
So he went to Commodore and Kiloo and began clearing the rights. He also contected Apple right away, if an emulation-project like this would be possible to release on some future day. The got really exited at Apple and confirmed the project. And here we are now.
And you know what? Apple rejected the app!
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.
Picture posted with kind permission of Ross Racine
I do not want to talk about that totally web 0.8 styled website, with all that old-school copyright stuff and even text displayed as graphic, as well as those somehow boring “my work can interpreted as…” texts. But what is interesting about the site is the work from Ross Racine itself: a mixture of hand-made techniques in combination with the computer – and the vision behind it.
“Drawn freehand directly on a computer and printed on a high-end inkjet printer, my works do not contain photographs nor scanned material.”
He paint “suburban cities” from an urban-planning point of view. They are greyscaled, mostly have a bigger idea of a special form in mind (circle, spiral, tree, labyrinth), have a high aesthetic value, but are quite frustrating, if you imagine to live there or even to orientate in suburbs like this. Good, here we are now. Game-designers? Will you now take over and give it a third dimension?
