Glum Buster is a strange jewel. You will need a little time and patience to explore the world of this game. It is even hard to describe, what type of game it is. It contains elements of many different kinds of games: puzzle, adventure and a little shooting. Game-elements are crafted carefully, leaving a path of strangeness behind. One possible comparison would be eventually Leisure Suit Larry or the other old games from Sierra, because the overall goal of the game is to collect xxx of 275 points. The rest is up to you.

The game “Glum Buster” also seem to have a little bit of an interesting history. It took four years in the making. The developer Justin Leingang (aka CosMind) was only involved in a little community, foremost the EO-community, that always release extremely interesting indie-titles. About the game Justin says, that it is “a collection of my constant, thick-as-brick daydreams”. Can be simple as that. In an interview with GameSetWatch he said something really, really interesting:

“Glum Buster was primarily inspired by the initial play mechanics of the prototype that I built. From there, bizarre as it may sound, it was continually inspired by itself. I was constantly fueled by the development of each component – be it play mechanics and dynamics, graphics, sound effects, functionality, etc. As a result, inspiration begat inspiration. It was a pretty gratifying reciprocal process, really.”

Sounds cool, huh? Let’s check out the game. Head over to the Glum Buster website.

Do you want to create a Flex or AIR application with a menu, that looks and behave like the menus from applications or the operating system? Good, than you found just the right tutorial.

Recently I spend two days on creating a MenuBar in Actionscript/Flex (for an AIR application), that should look and behave just like an ordinary menu we know from simple applications. Two days! Flex offers with MenuBar a versatile and fancy menu with boosted graphical effects, complex skins, fade-ins or other extraordinary things, that distracts from the for the pureness of a simple menu. And it pulls resources as well. Strapping it down and uncluttering is a way to do so, if you want to do a extremly simple menu. But it will cost time and will mess up the code (but it is possible to do so, we will come to this also). There is a much more elegant way to do menus for AIR-applications: Native Menus.
Read more »

Today I found something really interesting. It looks esoteric, but the hack should work (although I haven’t tested it myself). If you use a floppy-disk for recording and replaying audio, you will get an “floppydisk-reverb-effect”. Interesting things. You can look at the webpage of FatManAndCircuitGirl for more esoteric, creative technology hacks. (via)

And a big “thank you” to one of the most leading and important netlabels we had, when we talk about ambient and experimental type of music. Autoplate was run from 2001 to 2008 and was a sublabel of the still active Thinner-netlabel. Sven Swift did an interview with Sebastian Redenz on Phlow-Magazine about the development of the label and the reason, why they put it down:

Autoplate was always on a much smaller scale compared to Thinner, the label didn’t organize any live shows and the people never left much feedback. Unsurprisingly though cause there’re indeed many excellent Netlabels releasing ambient and experimental music. So we decided to fade the project out with a final release and to concentrate on Thinner, which just has a bigger audience and potential and thus is more interesting for all of us.
(…) Recently I’ve came along a statement which said that Netlabels gave a new bloom to ambient and experimental music in general. I couldn’t agree more!

They released a fine “closing compilation” (.zip) with the best tracks from the Autoplate-years.

enso.tumblr.com

Want pixel? No problem. Check out the Pixelstyle-blog, a project run by Enso. He is a 19 year old illustration student. The pixelstyle-blog is an ongoing exploration, of everything pixed-styled, that is there – showing various techniques. If you want to fall into the world of pixel – start here.

(via)

Chipmusic fans – listen up. 8-bit FM is a streaming radio station, that delivers fine chipmusic and chiptunes from all over the world. The radio station is combined with asmall event calendar and a twitter stream. Great. A neat, 2009-styled website.
(via Superlevel)

Ooookay (insert breath sound here), if you like Twitter and sounds, than things can finally go “social”. Whether this is useful or not, it’s an exploration of a new medium: Tweet-A-Sound is basically a MAX/MSP-based sound generator for your local machine. You can play with it and then send a soundpreset in text-form to a Twitter-account. MAX/MSP users will be very familiar with this kind of format. Then you can receive data from your friends or other Twitter-people, feed that data into your Tweet-a-Sound application and play the sound from there. Nothing revolutionary. Or maybe perhaps? Recently only available for Mac-users.