Submitted to this years IGF 2012, Parallax by Zi Ye and Jesse Burstyn is an interdimensional platforming and puzzle-solving game. The goal in each level is to reach the exit by travelling between two overlapping dimensions through rifts. Parallax challenges the player to think beyond the spatial boundaries of traditional platformers.

Continue reading.... Parallax [Games]

Karl D.D. Willis, Ivan Poupyrev, Scott E. Hudson and Moshe Mahler have just released details of their latest project at Disney Research, a novel interactive system that allows multiple people to play and work together using a custom handheld device. The device combines handheld projector, IR camera and a ranging sensor. The project is a step forward from MotionBeam, first project by members of the team developed with Disney and  Computational Design Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

The system is immediate and simple: users simply project onto a surface and their projection becomes aware and responsive to other projections nearby. Interaction can range from projector-based games, such as boxing with projected characters, to everyday tasks such as exchanging contact information by ‘dragging and dropping’ onto another user’s projection.

The system consists of a hybrid mobile projector that outputs both visible and invisible projections at the same time. The invisible projection contains tracking data that can be recognised by the device camera, allowing accurate location tracking of multiple projections and lightweight communication between devices. The games range from boxing match to task management and file exchange. See video for details.

Continue reading.... SideBySide [c++, Mobile, Mac, Games]

Organized by Alex Myers and Jeff Thompson games++ is a 12-hour game development event where participants build games from scratch in a defined time period. Designed as a collaborative, communal making experience, games++ lives up to the heritage of its name: to incrementally add to the pool of amazing, experimental, one-off games in the world.

This event is a low-key, hard-working environment designed to get you making in an intense way – something that can be hard to do when sitting at home. Collaboration and conversation is encouraged and there will be mini-sessions throughout the day to encourage discussion, beta-testing, and general good-times. games++ is open to video game makers, artists, programmers, psychogeographers, designers, and anyone else interested in spending a day making something from scratch.

Friday, November 4, 2011  |  9am-11pm | Drift Station Gallery  |  1746 “N” Street (at 18th)  |  Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

Register here

2SLEEP1 is a playlist of audiovisual performances in text mode, designed to make you fall asleep. The idea is to show the music being composed in real-time along with typewriter-style animations.

Both the music interface and the graphics are built up from text symbols. This means that the (graphical) objects can work together with the (musical) instructions, on a visual level. Vank is a first rough test of this and Matsamöt makes a similar thing, without the improvisation. Finally, Echidna is a silent movie with semi-live music.

Continue reading.... 2SLEEP1 [Games]

Our good friend Brandon Boyer, Offworld.com editor and IGF Chairman, has just launched a campaign on Kickstarter for VENUS PATROL, his upcoming successor to the Offworld. Within 5 days the campaign has reached the target but Brandon needs all the support he can get. The larger story is that a ton of amazing people have given their time & talent over to giving away some super incredible stuff for people who donate which include an exclusive wallpaper painted by KATAMARI DAMACY & NOBY NOBY BOY + MINECRAFT character skins from Pendleton Ward, creator of Adventure Time ((1$ donation only!), new games exclusive to the Kickstarter by CANABALT creator Adam Saltsman + RADICAL FISHING/SUPER CRATE BOX creators Vlambeer ($25!!), a new SWORD & SWORCERY 7″ EP + so much more for $75….and the list goes on!

Don’t miss this, only 23 days to go!

Support on Kickstarter

Hi, I’m Brandon. I ran a blog about videogames called Offworld for Boing Boing from winter 2008 through autumn 2009, and doing so changed my life forever. It wasn’t the first time I’d written about videogames ‘professionally’, but it was the first time that doing so started to make me feel like part of a bigger and entirely amazing community. A community of artists, musicians, designers, coders, nearly all of whom had taken the terrifying risk of jumping out of the rat race and trying to live life on their own terms: by creating things they know only they can create and trying to find an appreciative audience who might support them.. read more…

Steph Thirion has just posted a new video teaser for his upcoming game Faraway. For those that are unfamiliar with the name, Steph is the person behind Eliss, one of the earliest and probably best games for the iOS platform. The trailer below was all made in code, an uncut programming sequence. No video editors were used.

Continue reading.... Faraway [iPhone, iPad, Games]

In the decade where videogames were born, everything virtual looked like rectangular blocks. From today’s perspective, the representation of a tennis court in the earliest videogames is hard to distinguish from a soccer or a basketball field.
‘PING! – Augmented Pixel’ is a seventies style videogame, that adds a layer of digital information and oldschool aesthetics to a video signal: A classic rectangular video game ball moves across a video image. Whenever the ball hits something dark, it bounces off. The game itself has no rules and no goal. Like GTA, it provides a free environment in which anything is possible. And like Sony’s Eyetoy, it uses a video camera as game controller.

What I found interesting when I developed this game, is, that it could have been made already in the seventies. The technology that I used for it is (in a way) similar to what Atari used for the first Pong. It becomes even more awkward, if you think that the electronic components for capturing and evaluating a video signal are cheaper than the rotary game controllers that Atari used. But still, from an economic point of view it makes sense that Eyetoys weren’t the ultimate controllers of thirty-something years ago, as a video camera was probably very hard to afford back in the days.

For those who want to know how it works:

The game is programed with AVR-GCC on an ATmega8 microcontroller that runs with 16MHz. The controller gets basic videosignal synchronisation information from an LM1881 sync separator that triggers two hardware interrupts. One for a new image, the other one for a new line. The controller evaluates the brightness around the pixel (/ball) via its comparator input. Drawing the white image overlay is realized with a simple pull-up resistor in the signal line.

Continue reading.... PING! Augmented Pixel [Tutorials, Games]