A quick sketch I made. Just using my mouse!!

Odopod Sketch is a simple, but absolute incredible drawing tools based on flash. The power do not rest in versatility or something like that, but simply in the well rounded craft and beauty of the “virtual pencils” you are able to use. Odopod can be read as a real “paper and pencils” simulation, really pushing drawing pleasures. To be true! Every time I tried this tool, I never thought, that this on the screen is made of pixels, because it just looked so very sketchbook! No more words here, just try it our for yourself!

Handdrawn? Nope, it’s Flash!

Ok, I am not the type of guy, who uses desktop wallpapers, in favour of plain, non-distracting colors. But I am the type of guy, deeply in love with pixel-art and retro-game graphics. No wonder, that I appreciate Desktopgaming. It is a collection of “Wallpapers” made of old games, including maps and level-mappings. As you might now… it’s some sort of difficult to display 2d-maps of whole levels properly on the screen in most cases. Many of the custom artworks on desktopgaming nevertheless found good ways to fall into the gaming-worlds, just without overdoing it. With clean and plausible elements, that give a picture of the whole.

via 1000ff [via Bonoboblogs]

Lately I fell into an (unfortunately) small, but interesting sort-of shooter game. Nanosmiles, developed by Dong, an Indie-developer from Japan, is a shooter with a dash of originality. Not only the setting of this game is a somehow organic micro-biological nature, but also the game mechanics are in some way. The “ship” you control, is not able to shoot, but you must collect and activate “drones” that do the job for you an enemies you point at. If one of your drones is hit, you if turns black, and you have to reactive it by touching it. So while the action is at hand, you do not focus on targeting the enemies, but on caring, collecting and re-activating of your drones, while setting the focus for them. Nanosmiles does this all in such a pleasant fluid way, that I missed the game after I went through all the levels.

The soundtrack of the game is completely available on my favourite netlabel ii-music. It is solid, not euphoric and released on the PLUS-section of the ii-netlabel. In PLUS ii-music they focuses on music and soundtracks for indie-games. A really good idea! I think Doug not only made the game, but the soundtrack, too.

Nanosmiles: Gameplay-Video

Note: This week I got addicted to another shooter, called the White Butterfly. Hard and addictive like hell.

This is how it looks like, if open ends are connected in the right manner. Wonderfl is a online-website, where you can livecode Actionscript and run in right away in your browser. The best is, that you can instantly branch (or fork) the codebase from other users and develop new scripts further with that code. The examples, that are already online, are interesting to play with and I really wonder into what the codes are growing into over time. Now we come to the open ends: Some of you will have to think on two projects, that eventually gave a good inspiration to Wonderfl: CodeTree and OpenCode.

CodeTree was a conceptional project for processing-coders, where they could upload and share projects (code) online. The idea was, that everybody can “branch” existing projects and develop on top of the shoulders of others code. Unfortunately the interaction-design on OpenTree was never really upfront, disturbing the workflow. Meanwhile the website is somehow permanently off. Right at the moment it shows a “We are returning in summer 2008″. Wait. It’s early 2009 already..?

OpenCode was/is a research from the Physical Language Workshop / MIT Media Lab, where you can live-code Processing scripts in your browser and let it run right away. Some months ago I wrote here in this blog “Is this the future of programming?“. Maybe yes, maybe no. But Wonderfl just took us one step closer into that direction.

2D-Boy, the man best known for his game “World of Goo” gives us some neat hints, on how to make a good game within 48 hours. It was because of, yeah, the Global Game Jam. Many thanks!!

A man called Ze Frank made a flash-implementation of an interesting experimental etch-a-sketch system, he called “Voice Draw“. You use your voice, to control the ink on the screen. The volume of your voice is the parameter used to control the sketch. Low-volume turns the line counterclockwise, mid-volume straight and high-volume clockwise.

The volume-controlled control is an interesting approach. Like on the real etch-a-sketch you first have to learn to draw again, especially because you have your “pencil” always on the paper. But, if you think the system further, you could even record or render sketches to sound and save them in audio-format. Wow, I should start experimenting with it…

via Neatorama / Etre

Update: Look at this site. They have some songs visualised with Voice-Draw.

Simply brilliant. Hand-driven. Note the operator. She learned how to speak with sounds. Beautiful!