The Assemblee competition is done – votings for the submissions are now accepted. The whole Assemblee was this kind of… massive! It was a cometition based on two parts. In the first part, everyone was invited to submit graphics, sprites and all other kinds of assets to make a game out of it. Not only the number, but also the quality of the submissions (warning, huge list) was awesome. A big pool computer- and gamegraphics. There was also a part about music. In total over 170 people submitted stuff. All this content is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

In the next step of the compo, this assets were used, in order to make games. In total 73 games were submitted. And they all look extremely cool. You now have the chance to make the Assemblee-organizers a little bit of work by voting. There are votings for the assets and votings for the final games. Whatever you do – have fun exploring this stuff. Votings are open till 3rd February 2010. Thanks to all participants for this!
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Wait what, 1000? As you may have noticed, Digital Tools (this blog) finally reached the 1000-RSS-reader-mark permanently (measured with Feedburner). Having 1000 RSS-readers is like turning 18 for a blog, isn’t it? Time to celebrate this! Tonight I will have a small elite party with mostly bloggers and creative-, and cultural-activists from the region. If you are in Cologne right now and want to join, please put me an e-mail or twitter #DT1000.

Devil’s Tuning Fork: Not only beautiful, but also innovative.

The student winners of the IGF 2010 student competition were announced. As you can imagine, there are high quality works among them, some have really innvative things to show.

My interest went to the game “Devils Tuning Fork“. It’s basically a game in the style of a “first person shooter”, but the interesting detail is provided by the texturing. The game is inspired by works of M.C. Escher and the echo-sounder / echo-location communication (like dolphings and bats do). You strife through blackness, until an “sound-event” is taking place. From there a lightwave is illuminating the scene. One of your tools is a “tuning fork”, that dispatches sound waves. The goal of this game was to “explore a new mode of perception through sound visualization.” Like if you were playing with your ears.

The game was made in about six months by a bigger team. The result looks cool, polished and that new visual perception really scores! They also had some kind of storyline, not too original, but also something “above the line”:

As a mysterious epidemic causes children everywhere to fall into comas, one child wakes up in an alternate reality. It is up to this child, the player, to determine the cause of the epidemic and save the other children trapped here. By way of the devil’s tuning fork, a magical instrument that allows the player to perceive sound waves, the player must find all the children and successfully escape this alternate reality, thereby waking up from the coma.

Update:
I found just another cool making-of:

Peter Nitsch build another interesting video to text application. ASCIImeo is, like the name implies, a portal, where you can watch Vimeo-videos in ASCII-format. A really strange mixture of high-tech and lo-tech. Check out for example Flight404’s Magnetophere/Nebula in ASCII-video.

There is a new pixelart-book (+ CD-ROM) available, from the Japan designstudio Maniackers Design. Just right at the moment, that work is only available in Japan, i.e. via Amazon Japan. Let’s hope, that some local retailers will get copies of this book, too. To look inside the book: Maniackers Design set up a flickr-fotoset to promote the work.

Screenshot-detail game “Hase und Wolf”

PolyPlay was videogame-machine in the GDR (German Democratic Republic aka DDR). There you could insert coins, select and play some computergames. They had very lovely names like “Wasserrohrbruch”, “Schießbude” or “Hirschjagd” (in English: “Pipe Burst”, “Shooting Gallery” or “Stag-Hunting”).

PolyPlay was the only public videogame-machine in the whole country, manufactured by the “Kombinat Polytechnik und Präzisionsgeräte Karl-Marx-Stadt”, that’s why “Poly” in the name of this machine. The videogaming in the GDR was very special, because most of the stuff were more or less copies from games played in the West part of Germany. The whole GDR was more or less disconnected from the international videogame-developments.

And now comes the best part: There is a website, completely dedicated to the PolyPlay-machines. There you can also play the original games, just within your browser! How cool is that? Take the retro-dive now.

First Person Tetris… hmmm….. What could that be? I just do not want to spoil you, just have play! Yay!