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.

Poly is an experimental drawing app for the iPad, made by the Innoiz Inc. interaction design team. With Poly you can “overdraw” existing images from your library or the camera using a Triangulation-method. Each generated triangle derives its colors from the pictures, that lies below the triangle-pattern. With that app you can quickly generate pictures and patters, that remind on cubism-paintings and abstract portrait-skechtes. People who are into experimental sketch-apps, should definitely take a deeper look at Poly.

Our friends from the Interdisco-netlabel in Switzerland released an interesting listening EP. The “Mittelmass Variationen” are remixes from the Mittelmass EP, originally made by Volta Vital. The remix artists are from the Interdisco-Label. Volta Vital carefully selected tunes for each respective remixer and the outcome is this nice piece of music, with lazy grooves and original Schwyzerdütsch lyrics. Download!

Artist Benjamin Grosser made this beautiful ai-based painting machine that uses audio-input via microphone, to compute its own drawing paths. The process, how the shapes are connected to audio isn’t clear for the visitor (but explained on the project website). It’s about some artificial intelligence algorithms, that computes the sound. If no sound is present, the machine “listens to itself”. What I like is the sound-feedback of the painting process, that goes to the exhibition-room again.

I really appreciate this work from Grosser, since I was lately also experimenting with computer aided painting at the Dingfabrik (pic) as well.

A wonderful chipmusic album, that combines lofi pushing beats and chip-arpeggios with ambient-like flight over cityscapes and blissful moments in general. It’s available for download in a “name your price” mode. Starfields and Cityscapes. (via Malobit)

There are more and more creative code tools for the iPad emerging, that use Lua as language. That is not only, because Lua is highly versatile and easy to learn, but because Apples allows to let Lua-interpretes run on their devices. Via Create Digital Motion I discovered Codify today: A full development IDE, that runs on the iPad. You can build scripts creative code experiments or even games with that tool. A really well designed tool for people who like to tinker with code. Here is the reference of the API. And here is the AppStore-Link.

PS: I lately had another posting about scripting-tools for iPad.

A neat and well executed videoclip from “2080″, song called “My Megadrive”. It is on the “Backup EP” from Gourmets Recordingz and should be at least available on iTunes.

Lately I was thinking about the problem to gather data as graphical input for i.e. motion graphics, that are not that obvious like using mouse, keyboard strokes or random-algorithms. By coincidence then I discovered IOGraph, a meanwhile older tool that was around with the name MousePath and now re-released under the name IOGraph. This small tool captures mouse-movements and writes them into a simple image-buffer – ready to be saved as picture. This tool was mary by Moscow designer Anatoly Zenkov “to brighten up the routine work“, he says. Nice toy to play around with and for getting new ideas. IOGraph is available for Mac OSX, Linux and Windows.

The Creative Applications-blog has got a very good read about good ways to organize visual patch programming languages like vvvv or maxMSP. It deals about top-down and commented vs. chaotic and almost non-organized. It talks about levels of complexity as well. The article talks also about aesthetics. Sure, if we are honest, we all foremost like patching languages not only because the are handy, but also because they most often look extremely pleasing to the eye.

Having fun with the Lauflicht Step-Sequencer

The result it this plugin for Renoise. With the Lauflicht you can trigger single steps within the different channels. Some of the highlights include: 8, 16 or 32 steps, unlimited tracks, unlimited patterns, set up for each track a sample, sample bank, a vst instrument or a Midi instrument of your choice. Set for each step: velocity, delay, note values including “note OFF”, note length. Chord mode: insert up to 3 notes in one track and much more.

PS: Cie told me, that he used the Lua-language to make the plugin.
PPS: For those who wants to know. Cie also made some other cool code several weeks ago. He wrote a “Discography-plugin” for Facebook, called “Discoggy“. Read more about it at the Renoise-forum.

Some Demosceners came up with the idea “how much music you can make with one line of code“. It didn’t take long, and some guys came up with some code to experiment with: just put it some strangely technical code onto the software and let the result be heard. After that it didn’t take long and some other guy build a JavaScript-environmnt around this program to make it on the web. After that, some visualizing goodness was added to the thing. You can try it out for yourself at this site.

And this is how it looks like:

Cool thing – it remembers me on some other experiments from the last years, like Tweet-a-sound, Tweetcoding in ActionScript3 or demo in less than 140 characters.

Make Pixel Art is a very promising-looking online-pixeleditor that is currently in its beta-testing-phase. It has got not only a very neat look and feel, but also very concise designed features. There is for example a “shop”, where you can browse artworks of other people in order to paste it into your own artworks. Or a “cube-tool”, that lets you draw lines, that suit isometric-look of pixelart. There is also a version planned for iPad. Really, really promising looking project!

PS: You can get to the beta at the moment at http://www.makepixelart.com/beta.

This is a talk of Marius Watz from the Eyeo Festival. It about code, form, art and code as a form of art… ;) (Sorry for this pun.) Indeed code and code as an expressive artistic medium is one of the topics, that really interests me right at the moment. There will be stuff going on by the way, I will post some news in few weeks. (Just a hint, I work on a scripting-framework for FabLabs and CNC-machines). Okay, enough from me, let’s roll the talk!

Title-Scream is a quite minimal website, an El Dorado for 8-bit and 16-bot game lovers, pixelartists and designers. It is a collection of colorful start screens from console-games of the 8-/16-bit era. Some of the screenshots are animated. There is also some stuff to discover: between well known games like Tetris or Mega Man there are screens of games I never heard of before – like for example some rare games from Japan or the US. (via Buro Destruct)

The Fach & Asendorf Gallery calls itself the “the major online exhibition gallery for net.art, media art, digital madness and satisfaction“. And indeed they feature some very interesting works and positions related to animated gifs and net-art. Just have a browse and enjoy this fresh media-art! They are also on Twitter. (via Althausen)

The Mozilla-Labs had a browser-demoscene thing going on. The task was, to create demos for the WebGL-language, due to push the bounderies of open web-technologies further. Three weeks ago, the results and the winners were declared. I think it is best to directly go to the demo-gallery and browse all submissions.

It’s been a while, since the “Dot-Cubes”-Project from Michael Maria Tichy seen the light of the day. It was a pixel-art comic about different web 2.0 aspects. After some successful month, it went silent about that project. But some weeks ago, Michael told me, that he relaunched the concept again: With the Cubies. The latest work is a chipmusic inspired Oktoberfest-song with a neat pixel-animated video and lots of remixes. To connect, you can follow the Cubies-facebook page.