Well, good news! The Flixel game engine is released! What does this mean? This could be groundbreaking news for Flash / Actionscript3-based game developers.

flixel is a completely free collection of Actionscript 3 files that helps organize, automate, and optimize Flash games; an object-oriented framework that lets anyone create original and complex games with thousands of objects on screen in just a few hours, without using any of the Flash libraries.

Open, attached to a community, with a forum and a decent style. Any more questions to ask? Nooo. Some days ago the developers released a little “Hello World” game, called Fathom.

Update: I made an Interview with Adam Atomic about Flixel.

Heavy Weapons is a well balanced and excessive shooter-game, with a touch of demoscener-style. In this browsergame you have to shoot a certain amount of enemies in every of the 60 levels to unlock and move forward into the next level. In a shop you can equip your ship with lots of different weapon-systems. And this is where most of the fun comes in. There are lots of different weapons some big, some small, some clever, always with shooting-pleasure guaranteed.

The graphics and the sounds in this game have a decent quality, making this game an unique experience. In some levels I felt like thrown into a sea of good old level-wonderlands I met on the Amiga 500. Game recommodation of the week! Play Heavy Weapons.

A game-parody of one of my very favourite games: International Karate Plus. The video was made by Bland Lands. (via)

The A MAZE-Festival is spreading its wings. The “warming-up” before the conference starts is an exhibition called “First Step” and can be still visited today. It is some sort of small, improvised exhibitions of game art – they did changed a private living room into an exhibition space for this reason. You can read this report (in German) from Robert Glashüttner, that explains the experience and the exhibits in detail.

Roy Block

One of the works shown there was the “Roy Block“, a media-project by Sebastian Schmieg he made at the Merz Academy Stuttgart. It’s an a tangible interface, that provides an experimental gaming experience, where you take real cube objects, to control the player on the screen. Roy Block is written in Processing and uses “reacTIVision software” for tracking.

Well, simple basic techniques grow old. This is how it can go. Videos from Ljudbilden.

From this:

To there:

(via)

At the beginning was… text-mode!

A screener from the probably very first incarnation of Tetris.

You are almost 25 years now, but still such a beauty. As you turn 25 on the 6th June 2009 (Reuters says this is the possible official date), we do not want to talk about what million selling beast you are still today, like all the other media do. No, we want you to dig everything possible out of your mystic and gameplay specialities. Check this post for all about tetris gameplay.

Alexey Pajitnov almost made no bucks with Tetris itself, because it was a little bit of Sovjet vs. the rest of the world thing, due problems with licencing and people acting strange. But Alexey also said, that he made some other games as well at that time in 1984. At least he looks happy, and making games is not only about bucks, right?

25 Years later…

…thousands of Tetris-copies and -variants were made. And some of them are real jewels. I most recently found a one- or two-player variant called Inverted. You drop blocks from top and bottom and have to keep the “colors” consistent. It’s fresh and highly recommended!

Inverted: A random Tetris variant from 2009.

Update: Thanks Jordan. There is a tetris-documentary online, made by the BBC in 2006, called “From Russia with Love”. See the first part here.

For the rest head over to this YouTube-playlist from GameDocumentaries.

Don’t confuse Audunios with Arduino in this case. Audunios is the name of a small do-it-yourself synthesizer-kit, that was invented and constructed by tinker.it, licenced under a open-source licence. Some home-made tinkering can be done with that, resulting in a self-cooked synth, ready to go. This version here was done by Denkitribe. The linernotes on YouTube tell about this fantastic work:

I build one and plugged a stylus controller which was ripped from Gakken SX-150. It works very well. Its sound is dry and crispy, but I think it is not bad for $50. Want one? Do It Yourself!

Beautiful. Here is another one, made by machinecollective:

Get all source-codes, how-to’s and more examples at the Audunios page.