“Beet Fleet” is the name of a work, that was made Filip Kostovic as a result of the Bachelor course of studies Game Design 2010 at the HdK Zürich. The sort of game uses two turntables as input devices, that controlles the action on the z- and x-axis. The visuals are abstract and strong, with parallels to Tron or Rez. The longer I think about this, the more it seems, that Beat Fleet is a consistent extension of the basic idea of Rez, taking real “analog” hardware controller into account. Will DJs keep on playing games in the future at work? Also check out the other works, they all look interesting. (via)

I am sure you already read somewhere about the Wolfire Humble Indie Game bundle. A whole bunch of great Indiegames for “Pay what you want”-price and DRM-free. The offer closes and slightly over million dollar were rised this way. Also two charity-oragnisations are supported by that amount of money raised (EFF and Child-Play), as well as the indie-developers itself. 4-color-rebellion wrote an interesting article about the money raised, the operating-split of the buyers, as well as piracy. About the piracy:

Well, over the past few days, Wolfire has seen 49.3 TB of raw downloads. The average user has downloaded about 490 MB of data (again, this is skewed by outliers – one user downloaded 10.3 GB). If you do some simple math, you find that there have been 105,497 downloaders. At the time that these numbers were released, there has been 79,000 paying customers. So, how about that? At least 25% of downloads of the Humble Indie Bundle have been by pirates (this doesn’t even include those that copied all of the games and mirrored them off-site).

Update: I just seen, that some of the titles are going to be released as open source: Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD and Penumbra Overture.

Found the blog “Little-Scale” from Sebastian Tomczak, where he presens various experiments with sequencer, hardware and waveform-modulators. The combination of weird hardware, devices with a raw pixelated sound make them unique works, that got into my heart right from the start. A cool combination of old meets new, like a MIDI-Sequencer for the Sega Mage Drive or iPod Touch controlling a C64.

The Love-Toolbox

Love – an indie online multiplayer-game, that look absolutely cool! “Love” created something, I am still speechless about. It fits a style, I never seen before anywhere. Feels a little bit like walking through an impressionist-painting, with little dashes of magic runes, Myth and something like Monkey Island. The online-multiplayergame got also something more interesting. Beeing indie, resources are limited. You pay 10 Euros in advance for one month of play – but only a limited number of players is allowed to play the game. The world is constantly changing, though the building abilities from the players. Looks like a very interesting project, we should keep an eye on it. There is a fantastic widescreen introduction video available.

The reasoning about the business model also absolutely makes sense to me. I meanwhile see it like Eskil Steenberg (Quelsolaar) and really hope to see the death of the “low-end ad-market” soon, that makes you drive millions of page impressions on crappy websites – just to get half of you living cost. Quality is not about cent-money. Quality is here to stay.

(via tigsource)

Internet theory. Jim Killeen googled himself and visited people all over the world, that got the same name like him. The name became a tool – an orientation subset vast global network. (via)

Thanks Vague Terrain! Otherwise I hadn’t noticed the Glitch Studies Manifesto, Rosa Menkman released at the end of January 2010. The cool thing is, that you cannot only download that stuff as a pdf, bit I can also embed it here into my blog. So I do:

“The Glitch Studies Manifesto is now ready to be read and destroyed!”

Queue

Increpare Games has an interesting slogan: “Let’s try something out here…“. If you expect experimetal works now, than you are absolutely right! The stuff I tried so far on the site are explorations of narrative forms, somehow in between storytelling, classical writing and game interaction. If you got 10 minutes of time, checkout for example Queue.