Osmos is a truly beautiful game, very concentrated, ambient-like. The game uses the biological principle of “Osmosis” as basic game-mechanics. You are a mote (something like a cell). By absorbing other motes, you will grow bigger and if you run into a mote, that is bigger, you will be absorbed, until you die. You can use propulsion to navigate through the matter around you, but beware, propulsion will cost you energy and shrinks you again: “Good things come to those who wait”, the makers of the game say. The motes look like cells or even planets, and also behave a little bit like them. There are special orbit-levels available with gravity involved.

Osmos is a mixture of a gaming and an ambient experience. The game has a special soundtrack, provided by musicians, that are around the netlabel scene, too. At the most recent version, the music was made by Loscil, Julien Neto and Gas/High Skies. Truly a good match! Let’s float around a little bit and relax with the game.

Until now only the demo of Osmos is released. There is a small suggestion, to enhance the controls in the next version of the game: At the recent version, you have to use the mouse wheel, to zoom in or out the scene. But what, if you don’t have a mouse wheel? It would be good to offer two more alternate zooming mode controls, for example with the right mouse key + mouse moving or even plain keys on the keyboard.

Left to right movement, simple and ill-designed colors. Pixelstyle and multiple-headed monsters and a conceptional storytelling. This is a love-story, right? All mixed up with a grown-up track from Goto80. This is “L-V–SC-LD-RTH-ND–TH”. What else do we need?

The video was made by Raquel Meyers. Oh, Goto80 announced yesterday in his blog, that he released 225 songs in 2008 and that he will concentrate in 2009 more on quality upon mass. First step reached!

Neat news from the leading Lego-enthusiast blog E-Klocki. The people really have a good sense for finding the right shapes and angles, like this late 2008 interpretation of a knights castle.

But they also do more. Look at this impossible shape to do. Not possible you say? Visit the post on E-Klocki to see how it can be done. More impossible Lego-things for example at the webpage from Andrew Lipson.

Nintendo DS Touchscreen

Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: Levelediting on the Nintendo DS

Nice links and posts along the way. Critical Gaming Network wrote a short feature upon level-editors on the Nintendo DS. They praise the freedom, that the touchscreen brings, compared to making and editing levels with plain buttons. Word!

Editing terrain is like painting. Positioning units/players/enemies only requires a drag and drop. After designing levels for the original Advance Wars on the GBA, I’ve found the touch screen controls to be absolutely liberating.

Microsoft Kodu (formerly Boku)

At the CES 2009 Microsoft presented Kodu, a new interactive 3-D modelling tool to create, edit and modify 3-dimensional worlds. Kodu is meant as a teaching tool for kids, to learn game design concepts. It can be loaded straight to the Xbox 360 via the Community Games Channel. So it is not exactly a game, but as you can imagine, Microsoft wants a new generation of young people to grow up on Microsoft.

This whole thing just feels so… Microsoft. And I don’t know how many people now have to think of the way of editing things at little big planet. I highly recommend to read this excellent article about Kodu on Create Digital Motion. No real questions open after that.

Here we have an advanced technique in circuit bending stuff. The Madnoodler not only made evil circuit bending with toys and dolls, but also documented the process in the form of stop-motion videos. Also note the decent soundtrack on the videos!

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Ladies and gentleman. I am sure, that you already know Vague Terrain, a virtual magazine on digital art, culture and technology. They regularly compile some kind of virtual journal on certain topics, that are very up-to-date or ahead-of-its-time and deal in between cultural and technological shifts in the field of art, practice and culture. They for example had past journals on the “Rise of the VJ” or “Digital Dub“. Besides texts and theory, foremost works from artists find their place in this magazine. The recently released number 12 of Vague Terrain, about the hot topic Device Art. In December they asked me for a contribution and it didn’t took me long to just agree. Vague Terrain is just great!

As many of the fellow readers know, I do not only write at this place, but also over at Eggshell-Robotics. My contribution therefore gives an overview of traditional and most recent developments on devices that can be coded, bend or broken. The second part focuses on robotics, because this will be the next thing to come, for everyone involved into art and tinkering with stuff.

The next issue of Vague Terrain will be about “citySCENE”. The call for works just already started. Just take your chance!

Yesterday I found this about 90 minute lecture from Will Write about game design. This is nothing new indeed, it is from November 2003. But what should I say? Is is premium content for free and thinking about design issues is never a wrong thing. It is about various things about game systems, motivation, psychology, artificial intelligence and simulation. Just like the games Will Wright likes to make, the talk touches many aspects, but without having this goal or “defeating the enemy”. It is circling about this and that. It’s more like the systemic approach what he is talking about: “possibility space”, “failure states”, “topologies” and “feedback loop” just to name a few. Would having a game with enemies and boss-fighting something like an orgasmic experience from his point of view? At least it would be a special subset of a system, that encourage the user to act. Will Wright thinking.