Well, good news! The Flixel game engine is released! What does this mean? This could be groundbreaking news for Flash / Actionscript3-based game developers.

flixel is a completely free collection of Actionscript 3 files that helps organize, automate, and optimize Flash games; an object-oriented framework that lets anyone create original and complex games with thousands of objects on screen in just a few hours, without using any of the Flash libraries.

Open, attached to a community, with a forum and a decent style. Any more questions to ask? Nooo. Some days ago the developers released a little “Hello World” game, called Fathom.

Heavy Weapons is a well balanced and excessive shooter-game, with a touch of demoscener-style. In this browsergame you have to shoot a certain amount of enemies in every of the 60 levels to unlock and move forward into the next level. In a shop you can equip your ship with lots of different weapon-systems. And this is where most of the fun comes in. There are lots of different weapons some big, some small, some clever, always with shooting-pleasure guaranteed.

The graphics and the sounds in this game have a decent quality, making this game an unique experience. In some levels I felt like thrown into a sea of good old level-wonderlands I met on the Amiga 500. Game recommodation of the week! Play Heavy Weapons.

A game-parody of one of my very favourite games: International Karate Plus. The video was made by Bland Lands. (via)

The A MAZE-Festival is spreading its wings. The “warming-up” before the conference starts is an exhibition called “First Step” and can be still visited today. It is some sort of small, improvised exhibitions of game art - they did changed a private living room into an exhibition space for this reason. You can read this report (in German) from Robert Glashüttner, that explains the experience and the exhibits in detail.

Roy Block

One of the works shown there was the “Roy Block“, a media-project by Sebastian Schmieg he made at the Merz Academy Stuttgart. It’s an a tangible interface, that provides an experimental gaming experience, where you take real cube objects, to control the player on the screen. Roy Block is written in Processing and uses “reacTIVision software” for tracking.

I started my 100 Abandoned Artworks project - a weekly series of Generative Art experiments created using Processing - back in October. Last week it reached the halfway mark, with number 50, where it is taking a well-earned break (which is the reason I suddenly find I have time to write blog posts again!).

The project has already far exceeded my expectations. The feedback I have received has been almost universally positive and I can see a clear upward curve in the quality of the work. I have also managed to keep on a weekly schedule without compromising my client work, losing my marbles or my wife leaving me. We even managed to have our second child somewhere around the 34 mark.

In January I also gave a talk on the subject of generative art, and the journey I had been on with the project, which proved both popular and warmly received. More recently, after seeing how good the stuff looks printed, there has even been talk of a book (!).

I will be continuing with the next fifty on a less rigid, more erratic schedule, starting soon; the project still has a long way to go yet. I suggest you subscribe to the feed if you want to follow its progress. But before I can start thinking about that I have six months worth of emails to answer …

Author: ericandrade81
Keywords: Processing Memo MSAfluid Nathanaël Lécaudé multitouch TUIO
Added: June 4, 2009

Well, simple basic techniques grow old. This is how it can go. Videos from Ljudbilden.

From this:

To there:

(via)

Ok, so I may very well be one of the slowest writers ever, but I am pleased to finally announce that I have completed a draft chapter for what I hope will become my next book: The Nature of Code. Based on my experience getting Learning Processing out into the world I’ve decided to go ahead and experiment with self-publishing. I’m not sure what service I’ll ultimately use or exactly how I’ll distribute the text (most likely as a PDF for sale online as well as print-on-demand physical book) so feel free to write me with suggestions, etc.

Let’s take a moment to go over some of the finer points as to why I am doing this.

Dollars and cents

Learning Processing retails for $49.95 (amazon’s discount is 10%: $44.95). When the publisher sells a copy of the book, I get some money (yay for me!). Based on my first royalty statement, this works out to approximately $3.73 per copy. Sure, I’m not writing books about programming with Processing to get rich, but I did spend a couple years working hard on the project and every little bit counts.

Let’s assume for the moment that I could sell the same exact book via lulu.com. The actual cost for printing the book would be ~$14.00. Ok, so let’s say I choose to sell the book at $25.00 (half the actual current cost.) That’s $11 of profit for every book sold, lulu takes 20%, leaving me with ~$8.80 per book sold. The book costs half as much and I get more than double the revenue! Now, this is just one scenario. I haven’t decided what service to use, how much of a mark-up is appropriate, etc. But you get the idea. There’s no reason a no color, no frills, beginner programming text needs to be $50.00.

Release early, Release often

As an author, it’s just nice to have total control over the process. With self-publishing, I can do things like release early drafts of PDFs online for feedback (see below). This is not something I could have easily done with a traditional publishing house. Instead of spending months or years writing a book before anyone sees anything, the idea is that I can just put stuff out there (for cheap) as I type and then iterate. And there are no limits of how I choose to distribute the book (excerpts published as tutorials on Processing.org? Free on my site? PDF for a million dollars? Audio book? It’s all fair game.).

Once the book is done, I can easily continue to make changes and update. Now, Processing has a fairly stable API, one that is not going to undergo massive changes anytime soon. And sure, how gravity works, the formula for the mandelbrot set, these aren’t concepts that are going to change that often. Nevertheless, anytime you write a technical book, technology changes faster than you can write, and no matter how careful you are, there’s no way to avoid making a serious amount of mistakes. With self-publishing and print-on-demand, I don’t have to wait (possibly years) for a print run to finish selling in order to make changes. I could make them daily if I wanted to. And that Chapter on PHP that I realized I really should have included in Learning Processing, well, I could just add it whenever I so choose.

Downfalls

There are certainly some pitfalls to self-publishing. One major issue, of course, is deadlines. Without a publisher I’ve got very little pushing me forward other than myself. In fact, getting this first chapter done took me twice as long as I intended. And other projects are getting in the way, I’m not sure how fast I will actually get to chapter #2.

The other main issue is distribution. I don’t care if I don’t get my book in Barnes and Noble, I mean who is really buying Processing books at Barnes and Noble?! I do need Amazon.com, but looks like there are plenty of print-on-demand options that can be distributed via Amazon. The major question for me is university bookstores. I don’t have any numbers, but it does seem to me that Learning Processing gets stocked in a lot of school bookstores because it is being used as a text for classes. So this is something I need to figure out, how can I get a self-published book to stores.

Oh yeah, an index. The publisher made an index for me. There’s got to be a way I don’t need them for that, though.

In the end, I could be wrong. This could be a failed experiment. Maybe no one will buy it, maybe I won’t finish it. The nice thing, however, is that if I’m really headed in the wrong direction here, I can always change my mind and start sending out proposals to a publisher. But the other way around, going from a publisher to self-published, well, that wouldn’t be so easy.

So, if you’re interested in checking out what I’ve started so far, for now (subject to change), you can purchase the PDF on lulu.com. I’m selling draft chapters for small amounts with the idea that I could raise a little bit of money to pay for design, typesetting, technical editing, etc. once I’ve got a more finished draft.

http://stores.lulu.com/dshiffman

or on scribd.com:

The Nature of Code. Chapter 1: Vectors. The Nature of Code. Chapter 1: Vectors. dshiffman Draft chapter one of my upcoming book “The Nature of Code”. This chapter covers the concept of a vector and the basics for programming motion with the PVector class in Processing.

At the beginning was… text-mode!

A screener from the probably very first incarnation of Tetris.

You are almost 25 years now, but still such a beauty. As you turn 25 on the 6th June 2009 (Reuters says this is the possible official date), we do not want to talk about what million selling beast you are still today, like all the other media do. No, we want you to dig everything possible out of your mystic and gameplay specialities. Check this post for all about tetris gameplay.

Alexey Pajitnov almost made no bucks with Tetris itself, because it was a little bit of Sovjet vs. the rest of the world thing, due problems with licencing and people acting strange. But Alexey also said, that he made some other games as well at that time in 1984. At least he looks happy, and making games is not only about bucks, right?

25 Years later!

Thousands of Tetris-copies and variants were made. And some of them are real jewels. I most recently found a one- or two-player variant called Inverted. You drop blocks from top and bottom and have to keep the “colors” consistent. It’s fresh and highly recommended!

Inverted: A random Tetris variant from 2009.

• Conference : Création : de l’idée à sa réalisation — Comment artistes et techniciens travaillent-ils ensemble ?
• Speakers : Mathieu Audejean et Angela Frères (Les Fabricateurs / Panem et circenses), Pierre Andrac et Jany Jérémie (Lieux publics et Cie), Douglas Edric Stanley (École des beaux arts d’Aix-en-Provence)
• Moderator : Marc Voiry
• Conference series : Sirènes et blablabla
• Location : Palais Longchamp, Marseille, France
• Date & Time : Wednesday, 3 June 2009, 18:00
• Live radio broadcast : Radio Grenouille 88.8, Marseille
• Live stream : Radio Grenouille

Tomorrow I’ll be taking part in a radio debate on the subject of collaboration between artists and technicians, with the opening question: « how do artists and technicians work together ? ».

It is an odd formulation, no matter how commonplace, especially considering the obvious role form and forming play in any production of art. As if the artist came before the forming, instead of the other way around, or (even better) simultaneously. But of course, the idea itself has become so common that we have somehow taken it for granted as if by mere repetition we had somehow forgotten to distinguish temperament and disposition : art and technique are somehow, in some parallel universe that would be simultaneously our own, two disparate entities that after having been separated at birth can now be brought together in some novel embrace. That we still have to disentangle ourselves from such artificial constructs, it’s maddening. Art and the technosciences, two opposing forces brought together at last, how charming an idea — how charming, and how charmingly tedious. When do we get to move on from the preliminaries to the actual nature of our contemporary state of affairs?

Don’t confuse Audunios with Arduino in this case. Audunios is the name of a small do-it-yourself synthesizer-kit, that was invented and constructed by tinker.it, licenced under a open-source licence. Some home-made tinkering can be done with that, resulting in a self-cooked synth, ready to go. This version here was done by Denkitribe. The linernotes on YouTube tell about this fantastic work:

I build one and plugged a stylus controller which was ripped from Gakken SX-150. It works very well. Its sound is dry and crispy, but I think it is not bad for $50. Want one? Do It Yourself!

Beautiful. Here is another one, made by machinecollective:

Get all source-codes, how-to’s and more examples at the Audunios page.

Author: unigee
Keywords: flickr processing art drawing
Added: June 2, 2009

Well, well, well. Once again a musicvideo, that could be directly out of the head of an arcade game-designer. Still waiting for more people doing it the other way round: putting music into arcade-games. Music by Maps, video by Rob Chandler. (via)

I made a processing-sketch that shows the time using colors. i made 3 stripes of colors blending into each other,
each of them cycling through the hue value of the color. then i blend between the colors.

the top color shows the hour, the middle color shows the minutes and the low color the seconds.
the values start at red, blend to yellow and green, and get turcise at the half of the cycle.
than they blend to blue and violet and finally back to red.

click here to see it in action

the screenshot below was taken at 18:07