Small tile-map-jam I made yesterday in under 30 minutes
Ever struggled making decent tile maps for your small game project but not wanted to ask or hire an pixel-artist? Then this here is for you! It is simply one of the best tutorials on “how to make pixel-art” that I’ve ever read. The magic of this tutorial is, that you you learn how to make real “edges” to your basic, loopable tiles.
Just head over to tileset-tutorial. Everything is much better explained there, than everything I could write here. This tutorial was written by Blackmoon Design andy published at Wildbunny-blog.
When graphic-designers meet game-design – this can be a very fruitful combination. The game Reprisal is a good evidence. Artwork and in game-graphic of Reprisal is one of the most clean and charming pixelartwork, that came within the last years – playing in the same league as Sword and Sworcery or Fez.
The game was made by Jon Caplin, a UK-based graphic-designer. He worked on this game in the last six month as a private project. His blog says: “Ever since having an Amiga 500 as a kid I’ve been interested in making a Populous styled game.” And now the game is really to play (in your browser). Watch out – there are Reprisal printout-posters coming at you, too!
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)
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.
“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.
