Daft Punk got chipped! Basically there is nothing more to say. Maybe the onl line of text, showing up on the Da Chip website: “The music of Daft Punk revisited on Vintage Game Systems”. Best directly download this album instantly. Who knows how long it will take for hungry and bloodhirsty lawyers to take this piece of art down.

(Thanks Hecspc for digging this!)

Hey, did you noticed it? The Experimental Gameplay Project is back. The very origin of the meanwhile good-selling “World of Goo“. They somehow switches to a “monthly challenge” mode, based on a certain topic every months. Challenges are good, and perodic compos also. So welcome back EGP.

The topic of this month challenge was about “unexperimental shooter” and the contribution most worth to mention was the “Post IT shooter” from Petri Purho aka Kloonigames (the very creator of Crayon Physics Deluxe).

The Post IT Shooter

The Post IT shooter derives its optic from the videos, where people “simulate games” in stop-motion videos, using plain post it notes. Petri turned the direction around, and he wrote this game, that uses the optics of Post IT notes, in order to let a shooter game out into the internet. What a nice twist. You shoot at space-invaders looking aliens, that are generated randomly by a special algorithm. Don’t forget, that this game is not meant to give you pure playing pleasure for hours and hours, but to stand out by its great idea. Mission accomplished!

It’s got a fresh light sense, somewhere between contemporary character design (think Pictoplasma) and Spongebob. Also the soundeffects they used are very heartening. About the technical aspects: The whole projects was realized mainly with Actionscript 3 and the php/html/css/javascript/MySQL stuff. There is an in-depth post about it at Photon Storm. What is more to say? Ah, do they got posters to sell? I would love to dive into this world on my desk, too.

Realistic and awesome, isn’t it? The game was released as “Enviro-Bear 2010″ for the iPhone (cost 0.99 cent, App Store Link), but also an older PC-Version Enviro-Bear 2000 is available. (via)

/*SNIP*/: This video must be rare stuff. Offworld just right now digged and posted the whole episode. Go there to watch the whole, or stay here for the next teaser:

They were about many interesting things, for example about the game M.U.L.E (C64), that was later named Traders on the Amiga 500. A multiplayergame, that stresses interaction and the dynamic between the players, instead of just havin’ graphics and sound, in order so “solve a level”. Think “designing interactions”, instead of “design a game”.

Some indie-game: Aubergine Sky by MrPiglet

Than I came upon this game today. It is quite simple and maybe a little boring as well, but it shows somehow a little bit of the things, that foremost Chris Crawford talks about: layers of meaning. Have a play of Aubergine Sky. And go think about it.

Okay, I once made a homebrew pixeleditor called Smoove for Sony PSP and an unfinished one for the Nintendo DS. Today I discovered this pixeleditor for the iPhone, called 32×32. It looks very interesting. It features only 32×32 pixels and grayscale 5-colors palette. The usability aspects of doing pixels on the go seem to be solved in an elegant way. Just see for yourself:

The app should be available at the iPhone app store in some weeks. The price will be about 0.99 cent. (via)

Flixel and a little code-example.

Why did you made Flixel? Where did the inspiration came from?

Flixel is probably my most selfish project ever! The whole idea behind it was just to make it easier for me to make and distribute the kinds of games that I like to make. After my third game I had most of the bits and pieces that I needed, and figured with maybe a long weekend I could clean it up enough that maybe other people could use it too.

Is there any deeper open-source related philosophy behind Flixel, or was is a more practical decision to do this thing?

Nothing deep I don’t think. I’ve used and played a lot of free or open source apps and games, and always like giving back. I won’t go so far as to say I believe in karma exactly… but it seems like it can’t hurt.

How much time / effort does it cost you to maintain the project?

I’ve spent approximately one hour on maintenance since release, for the v1.1 update. This is where the karma comes in; if you give it away for free, then you can trade that karma for a little help from the self-starters who are willing to share their knowledge with everybody else. Within a day or two of releasing the framework, people had already posted tutorials for settings the package up in FlashDevelop and running MXMLC from the command line and and and…it’s pretty rad. Basically, if I had to do that stuff myself, I could never have released it. So I think it was really release it for free, or just don’t release it.

We are very curious if there are any plans to monetize Flixel now or in the future? (Don’t be shy, we are ready for everything).

Yes and no, sort of, I guess? I have some ideas, I’m gonna build some stuff with the help of some friends later this year that will involve Flixel, but I don’t think it will be anything you can buy, or subscriptions or anything like that. The trick is finding a way to monetize it that isn’t so annoying to actually set up that it just takes all the fun out of the thing… which I haven’t completely worked out yet.

What about Gamemaker, Clickteam or Torque? Do you care about the developments of the “other guys” doing tools in that field?

Unity3D is the only system that really impresses me; they mix the GUI and scripting and asset tracking and all that stuff really nicely. I think after actually making a bunch of smaller games my ideas about the fastest way to do this stuff differs some from some of the popular conceptions of how to make game-making more accessible, particularly the whole GUI aspect I think level editors, GUIs, and all that stuff is a real drag. It’s probably a little egalitarian but I think it’s actually good for people who want to develop games to kind of… meet me halfway, I guess. Plus most simple game-making GUIs encourage static art and static level design, which leads directly to really costly, slow content creation. Scripting I think encourages users to experiment with procedural design more if only to make their lives easier! For 2D games, if you can learn just a smidge of scripting and basic programming logic, and you have the right libraries, you can do REALLY amazing stuff really quickly (see the entire Processing community for example). Plus, hey, now you know how to program!

Are you willing to tell us more about features to come at Flixel? How about community driven developments?

Sure! The big stuff I’m working on soon is making it easier to insert sponsor SWFs, support for displaying traditional tilemaps, and just some general improvements and streamlining (especially for controlling render order and special effects). The community is working on a bunch of different level editors that they’re enthusiastically sharing, and they’ve already developed and released some nice stopgaps for both tilemap display and better depth control, which is pretty rad.

I also read, that you were involved in the Wii-port of Cave Story. How did you came into this project and what does this project meant to you personally (i.e. for your developing skills or things learned)?

I got involved with Cave Story Wii as a direct result of developing and releasing Gravity Hook. Tyrone Rodriguez, the head guy over at Nicalis, thought it was cool, noticed I was a bit of a Cave Story fan, and asked if I wanted to work on scaling up the boss graphics. I was a little nervous about getting involved with what would undoubtedly be yet another unreleased and subpar attempt to put Cave Story on some console or other. After doubtlessly insulting Tyrone to his face multiple times, we somehow agreed that for like $5/hour I would redo all the level graphics, with Amaya-san having the final say on everything. It turns out Tyrone had been working with Amaya-san for over a year already to figure out the right console and the right feature set for this project, and Amaya-san himself had complete veto rights. The job paid poorly, and it was really, really boring. I went through a couple years worth of This American Life episodes while tracing those tiles. I don’t know if I’ve ever worked on anything I’m so proud of! Cave Story (for PC) is the game that opened my eyes to what one person could make, and sparked a permanent shift in my life. To get to be involved with the official commercial release, and to get to have a say in how the thing looked to people who were playing it for the first time… it was just awesome.

How do you think the indie-game-community and the market will develop in the next few years?

The “indie” part will continue to mean less and less, and the opportunities for small teams with great ideas will get better and better. I hope.

Now we are still curious to learn a little more about you. Where you live, what did do, how old, etc.

Sure! I’m 27, and I live in Austin, Texas, USA with my amazing wife Bekah and my two idiot pug dogs. Right now I’m living off our windfall from an iPhone game (Wurdle) that I worked on last year with my rock climbing buddy Eric, and I spend most of my time either working on supporting that game, or (especially lately) prototyping and developing our next iPhone game, which should be announced in a few weeks. As for important career steps… I think getting a four-year degree was a good start, and opened some doors. After college I worked for a couple years as a software developer, at a place where I had some creative control over my projects and only had to put in 40 hours a week. That was a pretty big deal, as it left me some free time and didn’t crush my soul. Quitting that job to go solo was pretty exciting, but I was really bad at it for a few years. I would say the single most important step was when I finally learned enough from my failures as a freelancer to start doing it right. That was last summer, I think. That’s when the cool stuff started to happen! I made Gravity Hook, Paper Moon, and wurdle all in the same month, and a month later had picked up enough steady clients so that my wife could quit her job, too.

So this is not the first time, that you are doing games and things. What role do they play in your life?

Good question! I’ve been an art geek for most of my life, but I’ve always been intoxicated by the mixed mediums, especially comic books, movies, and video games. When you start mixing art and writing and sequential imagery and then pile in interactivity…it’s just too much! How can you not be obsessed with this stuff?

Well, yes. In that context. Do you have any games, book, movies or other peoples work, that you would recommend to people or that you really love? (We even accept famous quotes!)

Oh boy, haha where do I start? Here’s some stuff that people might not have heard of, I guess. Seems silly for me to list stuff like “Pixar movies” when everybody already knows they’re completely awesome? Anyways, some good stuff I’ve digested recently that has been nice brain-fuel:

• The Scar, by China Mieville
• The Taking of Pelham 123 Soundtrack, by David Shore (1970)
• Tekkon Kinkreet, by Michael Arias
• The French Connection, by William Friedkin

Many thanks Adam. I guess I am not the only one, that is looking forward new inspiring stuff made by you and the Flixel-community.

Text and Interview: Martin Wisniowski, 2. Juli 2009

Weblinks

• Flixel Engine
• Adam Atomic Website

Let’s name the “Homebrew Computer Club” as one of the (of not the) first hacker-space ever made, that led to a highly influential movement within the computer-market. Steve Wozniak was part of that hacker-space and he is really embracing the hackers way of thinking. At him we see, that this don’t must develop into illegal kinds of activities, but let to a highly influential company, we still now today under the name Apple.

Hacker-Spaces are still relevant, if not much important now, than in the past. The documentary gives a good insight into meaning, methodology and cultural impact of the hackers-movement.

“It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.”

Some of the results of this experiment:

“Throughout my week using the Walkman, I came to realise that I have very little knowledge of technology from the past. I made a number of naive mistakes, but I also learned a lot about the grandfather of the MP3 Player. (…) Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?“

Go on and read the whole article. There are more conclusions ahead. And cool pictures as well.

Well, a heartening short movie about growing up. It was a student-work on info-graphics at the Vancover Film School, made by Jr. Carnest. (via)