Syder Arcade is a shooting-game in the style of a really classical vertical shooter, developed by Studio Evil. The game does not only have a clean gameplay, but also very polished graphics. This is how classical shooting games from the Amiga-times would look like today. As a special feature, the game offers some “graphic filter”, that lets you select very strange in-game color-schemes. You can select for example, to play the game in color-schemes “Apple II, C64, Amiga HAM or gray2bit“. And since there is a decent lack of good shooting-games on Mac OS-X, consider this a gaming suggestion! (The game is also available for Windows)

(via)

Most recently John Ferrara published a book called “Playful Design“, that tries to bridge the gap between “everyday user-interfaces” and “game design“. It is aimed at user-experience-designers, who want to try to make their apps more sticky and more meaningful for the users. Here is the link to the Table of Contents.

The “Netmagazine” published an edited version of the chapter “Ten tips for building a better game“, with sentences like this:

“Consider what makes a game intrinsically interesting. You’ll find a lot of creative opportunity in games that make the player think through interesting choices instead of executing twitch responses.”

All in all, this book looks like a very nice lecture for both game- and user-experience-designers.

The great retro-casual game “Forget me Not” from Nyarlu Labs is now available in a browser-ready Flash version. The game features generative level processing, clean designed graphics, sounds and gameplay – and therefore a never-ending source of arcade fun! The game is already available for Mac/Win and iOS. (via)

PS: Nyarlu Labs has a good writeup in the blog, how he did the procedural level generation. Yay!

The art and research group “And-Or” from Switzerland released another interesting concept-game. Piksel Bacteria deals with Augmented Reality and the real world.

The concept is easy (and maybe not a game at all) – your mission is to “infect” as many pixels as possible with the “bacterium pikselum”. The bacteria breed, by looking at them with the iOS-camera. Give them food by taking them to an edge and start moving the camera along the edge. What I like about this concept is, that you do not need any QR-Codes or something other prepared, to step into the “Augmented Reality”-world, but that the “game” plays instantly from any phone in any environment.

Before “Piksel Bacteria” And-Or raised gameplay and reality questions in works like “Gamescape“, where the players input of the game results in architecture. Or Discrimination Pong, a work that raises questions about gameplay modifiers, asymmetric gameplay and discrimination.

Just stumbled upon this animated version of the still great book / project “How to survive a robot uprising by Daniel H. Wilson. It explains in shot, how to act on robots, if they get really hostile and out of control.

Yesterday I had the great opportunity to meet a delegation of the Broque-netlabel here in Cologne. Really nice guys, that still keep holding the free CC-music flag up! Broque is not only one of the oldest net labels meanwhile, but at the same time one of the netlabels, that convinces with their high quality output from release to release. The recently released album “The Atlantic Machine” form Auto-Pilot give a good example. An intense and personal album with remembrance to techno, electronic, songs, days and nights. A very clean production. Feel free to download this great music for free! (Here is the release page in German as well)

File-size still matters. Even in 2012. The JS1K is a demo-competition for doing amazing stuff in web browsers with JavaScript just under 1k in size. There is basically nothing more to say, but better just visit the site and browse the submissions! You can study the submissions-code as well.

Lately I came across this already Kickstarter-funded project, called “Spriter”. It is an “easy to use animation tool”, especially suited for game-designers. The tools uses a modular method of animation – instead of each frame being a single complete image, the frame is constructed from many small, re-useable images (for example body parts). Each of these images that are used to construct the full frame can be scaled and rotated to further increase reuse of content.

The developers at Brash Monkey promise, that with Spriter you can create robustly animated game characters and effects with a workflow that’s “highly intuitive, visual, and efficient for not only time, but also for the final game’s file and memory usage”.

Let’s wait and see, if there will be also a version available for OSX at any later time.

The German indie-games-scene try to get more indie – a part of the puzzle could be the Amaze Indie Connect 2012 in Berlin. The organizers want to become an international Indie Games Festival and meeting-place of the europäischen Indie Games Scene in Germany. There are talks, visions and for the first time a indie-gamedev price.

The project still ongoing crowdfunded at the startnext-platform. The money should go directly into the price-money for the games-devs – so feel free to support!

In case you missed the Make Pixel Art tool, listen up. It is one of the more interesting pixel-tools, that is somehow available for a variety of platforms. And it has a sort of innovative concept as well. Make Pixel Art is basically a pixel-editor with 3 editing-layers, a bunch of pixel-tools like draw pixels, lines, circles etc. There are more special tools, like “isometric drawing” or “lighten or darken colors“. But maybe the most interesting feature of Make Pixel Art is the embedded shop-concept. You can save, share, download and use your own creations or download and use some “pixel-packs” that other artist made for sharing. The UI of the tool gets you instantly in a blocky retro-mode. Well made. At the same time really Make Pixel Art is available at an affordable price (AppStore-Link). Just go for it!

PS: If you are in editing pixels, you will love to have a look at my own iPhone pixel-editor HiScore.

Fez, award winning indie-game from the Polytron Corporation will be released after 5 years of development. And it simply looks gorgeous. According to the indiegames-blog it will cost about 10 dollars and is localized in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Iberian Portuguese. Holy shit. Check out this footage, even just watching is pure pleasure. (If you have no idea what game Fez is, this mini-Polytron-site will help you).

Circadia is a minimal puzzle-game for iOS. At its core very simple, it adds depth by plain constructed levels, that adds trickyness and a sense for the right timing to the gameplay. Enjoy the video to learn more. Here is the AppStoreLink.

Audio Visual Algebra is a new project from Paris Treantafeles. Together with Mary Ann Benedetto (outpt) they launched the label Audio Visual Algebra. The label will feature innovative works in audio/visuals. In addition, they launched the recording label, Audio Algebra which will focus on music releases. The first release from Drum and Space introduces strong alienated electrovibes.

If you appreciate this stuff, feel free to read this interview I made with Paris several years ago about his experimental VJ-Tools on GameBoy and GamePark.

I just found this game that looks like pure fun. Flush the Goldfish a remixing sort of game, with many diffrent playing mode and a reduced input-mechanic. The A button changes the behaviour of the player in every room, like jumping, crawling, avoiding etc. Each screen is simple, filled with colorful pixelstyle-graphics. The game has casual upfront music and soundeffects. There is a in-depth-review – well written – avaiable at 4 Color Rebellion.

Flush the Goldfish is available for Nintendo DSiWare made by Goodbye Galaxy Games. Go for it!

Obelisque

A 3d-exploring game. You start as a robot, that woke up in an ancient, abandoned city on an planet far away, trying to research about what happened and what this is all about. A work with a strong mood – maybe close to “notgame” as well. Check it out! (Jammers-Site).

Sequpes

A music-toy, exploring game-mechanics and the joy of making music with two players. Player A plays a little melody and player B confirm this melody, by playing the same melody after some delay – or rejects it by not playing the melody. It uses simple music-phrases in the background and pentatonic scales. A unique fun experience – worth checking out! (Jammers-Site)

Nordic Bondage Hero Vikings

A mature fun game. Two players – bound to each other – have to collect and drink as much beer as possible. If drank enough, they enter “Valhalla Action Hero”-mode. When in this mode, player must kill himself to enter Valhalla. While you are running, you are tied to a second player with a rope. You can pull the other player and help or annoy him. If you begin to glow, try to kill yourself and die as a hero before the other player becomes a hero. (Jammers-Site)

Mindloop

An experimental exploration of a new input-device. The game uses a “mind-feedback-machine” as input. The player has to change “calm” and “focus” state of minds, to progress further in the loop. Polished graphics – things to build upon. (Jammers-site)

Don’t be square aka “The revenge of the psychedelic boring boxes” aka “vice versa”

A flash-experimentation game, exploring visual effects over gameplay. Something nice to tinker into – and to get inspired! (Jammers-Site)

Sifteo Specials!

Two remarkable works put a game on a new platform, called Sifteo. The tangible objects can be programmed, to also games can be run on them. We had a snake-game (unfortunately they did not provide the game on the Global Game Jams site yet) and Krystian Majewski once again launched a homing missile to out heart by bringing the Nyan Cat to the Sifteo! Programming by @mczonk (Jammers-Site)

Recommended

Feel free to look also into this works: Giant Robot Snake, The Tale of Archy, Loopy Island, Punxatawney Adventures. You can see, lots and lots of contributions. I made also a project – not finished unfortunately. If interested, look at Internity.

This one is a cool real-time face-tracker application. It utilizes the FaceTracker API by Jason Saragih and is build upon the openFrameworks-implementation of it (ofxFaceTracker). Than “simply” the mesh of the real-time recorded face is matched in the face-mesh of a celebrity and blended over the real-time picture. Cool stuff to build upon. The openFrameworks source-code is available! Credits for making this go to Kevin Atkinson and Arturo Castro.

via

The series scnclrBleep is based upon a YouTube-video account. It’s about own visual explorations, uploaded to creative commons music, unasked. Enjoy the latest four episodes!

PS: Thanks go to the especially cool guys at Broque and Renzu. Great music!

The Phlow-Magazine, that featured over 3 years daily reviews about free Creative Commons music, is back in 2012 with a nice package for all lovers of the internet-spirit. In 2012 Phlow will present a creative commons music highlight every single day. The music is curated by experts of the netmusic, namely Applejux, Brigitte Bijoux, Roland, Sven Swift, Mango Aioli, Christian Grasse and Moritz »mo.« Sauer.

The first door will open in just some hours! To stay in touch, visit the 366 Days of Music page and connect via iTunes podcast or RSS-Feed.

Famous netmusician Ugress is back with another brilliant cinematic electronica EP. The Luftslott EP brings you back to phantasy worlds, far far away. Embedded in wandering beats, retro-instrumentation (say hello to trackers) and pumping stabs. Gamers will love this a lot.

The music can be streamed on the Ugress website via SoundCloud and is available (and streamable) on Bandcamp. Download it with pay-what-you-want. Honor the music!

Sphero is a new gadget that has the potential to come massive in 2012. It is a remote-controller “self-rolling ball”. It can be remote controlled via smartphone or it can roll pre-programmed figured. Sphero can light in different colors. Even games are applied to this robotic ball: the demo-site already shows one smartphone-driven golf-game. The feature “Sphero-Cam” points into the direction of mixed reality apps where you can control and observe the robot-ball, while taking pictures at the same time. (via Neogolf)

The app ZX Plectrum is a simple digital-noise-generator instrument with just a limited functionality. In a retro Spectrum-ZX-style tones and visual bar-gliches are made, if the user touches the iPad-screen. It’s really just that. Not a very interesting app – I thought at first. But the longer I think about this app, the better I like the idea. It’s just about this – a really simple app, to turn the iPad into a more or less useless noise generator with just a single function. Reduced to the limit of usefulness.

The ZX Plectrum is made by Dave Sapien and his website revels just another interesting app: Paint Sapien. Also a more or less simple app. With this drawing tool the user can “wet-paint” with colors, brushes and simple filters. The interesting detail is, that the iPad2-camera enables some sort of “pressure-sensitive” drawing on the iPad, like tablets do.

Both are simple and interesting works. I wonder what Dave Sapien will come up next with.

(ZX Plectrum app via wire to the ear)

The German games-magazine “GEE” has shifted towards the iPad several months ago and regularly releases the “GEE Display” in the iPad Newsstand. GEE is known for its well-rounded games journalism, that does not only look on gaming-reviews, but also on the cultural side of gaming with aspects touching art, technology, society and politics.

Gee Display takes this approach onto the iPad and they made a good looking, relaxed and good to read iPad magazine. It features game-reviews, insight-reports, interviews and columns about art, music, gadgets and more. All articles are rounded up with high-resolution pictures, slideshows and/or videos, that play directly from the article.

Since the issue #4 Gee Display (App Store Link) is available in German and English as well. If you like a good gaming reading experience, you should take a look on this. The thing I like about reading “iPad Magazines” it, that it has a silent look and feel that is apart from the noise of the online-reading world. There are no bouncing ad-banners, to annoying click-me-here-or-there widget stuff. It’s just about the content and browsing.

Square is a small experimental flash game made by Etienne Perin. A little variation of the “Snake-game” category. In Square you do not fight against the length of your own tail like in Snake-games, but against black blocks on the field and time constraints. A well executed and fun to play game. Just check it out.