Digital Tools

Independent games superstar Jonathan Söderström, better known as Cactus, is famous for his outstanding quick, experimental and interesting games. I'll bet, that you all already met some of his games. If not, read this interview. Else start here. It will get interesting - we have some very interesting questions and answers at hand.

What was your initial mind when you started the game Clean Asia?

I had played a game called "Nvaders" by a guy with the nickname "TehSilentOne". It was basically a Space Invaders meets Warning Forever game. The small Space Invaders sprites had been blown up and each pixel had turned into a separate piece of the enemy. Some pieces where cannons others were just static. When you destroyed a piece, it left of a little energy power-up that you could absorb and then launch back as a charged shot. I really liked the idea as it allowed you to destroy the enemy rather fast as your power grew the more destruction you dealt. However, the game felt slightly rushed and a bit incomplete, so I decided to steal a bit from it and make my own thing centered around a similar mechanic.

Tomas Pettersson wrote a small application, that hit the gaming scene like a rock. SFXR is a sound tool to quickly make sound effects to use in any game. At least Tomas is very surprised about the success of this application, because for him it was just a logic step to write that app.

Tomas "DrPetter" Pettersson is a 25 year-old guy from northern Sweden who has been toying with computer programming since the age of twelve. His first real contact with electronic and computerized entertainment was the NES and from there it has progressed through the classic line of various consoles, C64, the Amiga and finally PC. Since 2001 he studies computer science and technology at the Linköping University in Sweden, but most of his spare time he uses to experiment with all kinds of things from sound synthesis to game/utility development, music composing and drawing. Digital Tools asked him some questions on the SFXR tool, the context it appears and on future plans and inspiration.

Hi Tomas. Why did you made this tool?

The main motivation for this specific application was that for several years I had noted a distinct lack of sound in most LD48 games.

What are LD48 games?

LD48 stands for Ludum Dare 48-hour game development competition. It is, as the name implies, a competition where entrants sit down and develop a game within a period of 48 hours. Everything about the game has to be created by one person within the given time limit, so you're not allowed to use content downloaded off the net or borrowed from friends.

Tobias Leingruber is a student at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart and got last year attention for a media-art webcrawler project called "Hoebot". This crawler was programmed for the student community "StudiVZ" - the german counterpart of Facebook. Tobias wrote in total two bots: Hoebot - a crawler automated to ask users on the social platform for data and Lovebot - a bot that connects people automatically "love"-based on the crawled data from Hoebot. The StudiVZ as a social networking platform for students got much attention in the german web 2.0 scene and at the same time was criticized for having issues on low security and privacy politics. And exactly at this point the crawlers set the point. The works of Tobias focus on networked and browser-based systems.

Timemachine on the website msn.com and Tobias Leingruber

Tobias Leingrubers recent work is focusing on Mozilla Firefox add-ons, with the Timemachine as the leading project. It is is a Firefox extension that brings websites back to the 90s by manipulating the display of any website browsing. This will maybe the starting point for a series of art-based Firefox extensions and a related art-add-on community. Read the why and how below.

Jari Komppa is one of the leading people around the Finnish non-profit group tAAt ry. They do every year the Text Mode Demo Contest that is held between the 11.11 and the 12.12. He is a programmer and PC demoscene veteran from Finland and still does random things on the scene when he finds the right inspiration. He says about himself, that he tends to like "small freaky projects.. for example, I wanted to play Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri again, and wrote a universal VESA driver for Windows to make that happen". We directly step into the topic.

Jari Komppa and a contribution from TMDC 9

Why do Text Mode Demos matter?

Interesting things come from limited environments. If you look what happened to the Amiga, or what's still happening on the C64, the limitations have stayed the same for ages, but people still keep finding ways to make more creative and interesting things with them. The Text Mode has a very low resolution (or, if looked in another way, a very strange resolution), very limited contrast and very limited and fragmented color space. Once you start to see these not as obstacles but as challenges you may end up with something completely unexpected.

Next up is another 5 Minutes and it's a great pleasure to present the work from Yann Seznec, maybe better known as "The amazing Rolo". He is one of the first who did a real music application for the Nintendo Wiimote controller, the Wii Loop Machine. Besides the pure application he got special awareness, because he definately brought a special flavor in using this controller interface. Check out his almost famous video upon that.

Hello Yann. Please something about yourself and what you do.

My name is Yann Seznec and I am a Franco-American musician and sound designer. I currently work with my brother Cory Seznec in Paris on music and sound design for a play at a 13th century abbey. Later this summer I'll be finishing a masters degree in Sound Design at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Besides I do music and try to make as many different types of music and sound as possible - from Appalachian folk music to interactive sound installations. I also keep weblogging.

Why did you made this tool for the Wiimote?

This is the kickoff of our new series 5 Minutes. We will feature here spotlights on people with current topics. The first one is Frank Westphal, Agile Software Technologist from Hamburg, who works as freelancer and consultant. His approach is about Web 2.0, Lean Management, Extreme Programming and test-driven Software Development. He did consulting on qype.com, makes an German podcast called Tonabnehmer and his latest project Rivva is a "Meme Tracker", that searches weblogs in context of Web 2.0 for top-stories and zeitgeist topics.

Hello Frank. Why do you follow the "Agile Software / Extreme Programming" approach? And why do you think this strategies work on software development?

I've been a proponent of Agile Development and especially Extreme Programming (XP) because I think that their approach to developing software is true to the nature of software. For the first time in computing history, we see software as what it truely is: soft, malleable, flexible and extremely easy to change. Software has this funny characteristic that its very existence changes its own requirements. How often have you demo'd some stuff to some people and got dozens of new ideas along the way? It's due to the fact that software is so intangible that directions keep changing during the course of a typical software project. Some people think that setting everything in stone (the plan, the requirements, everything) is the right answer, but we think that's just stupid. Change is inevitable. In fact, that's why we do software, not hardware, in the first place.