Highlights from The 2009 Indy Games Festival

Machinarium :: $20 / Point & Click / PC, Mac, Linux

There were 306 entries at IGF 09, and a good lot of them were unique. Independent games are on the rise, and I’m glad they are because a lot of them are 1. affordable, 2. very fun, 3. good looking. Independently produced games range from senseless to experimental to better-than-a-commercial-title-quality. Each one has it’s own quirks, usually with confusing/unconventional installations, or piggyback on some sort of existing technology to make a game engine. Machinarium (above), for example is a Flash Projector with a lot of SWFs in various folders. Similarly, Closure (down there somewhere) takes advantage of the fact that Actionscript 3 has better capabilities for image processing. My love for Indy Gaming is long-standing, so I’m a bit biased. Anywho, here are my picks from the crop!

 

Don't Shit Your Pants :: Free / Text-based / Flash

 

 

Closure :: Free / 2D Platformer / Flash

Enviro-Bear 2000: Operation: Hibernation :: $? / ??????? / ?

 

Super Meat Boy :: $? / 2D Platformer / WiiWare

Osmos :: $10 / Casual Survival / PC, Mac, Linux

Cortex Command :: $18 / 2D Platform War Strategy / PC, Mac (yeah, I’m wondering if my computer could handle this game!)

So the next time you’re at a LAN party (and there should be a time you give that a chance if you haven’t), be like me and annoy everyone with your new-found love for indy games. And even if that never happens, I put these up because it’s a small glimmer of hope for anyone who wants to start making something in their basement. Remember: Indy = no funding. Now go play the Machinarium demo! It’s so genius in it’s hot-spot-clicking simplicity… and that’s why I christen it the TRUE WINNER of the indy games festival (though it did not win. some other game called “Blueberry Garden” won, and it looked just pointless and boring)

Best. Game. Ever.

Gobelins

In case you aren’t aware, Gobelins is a school in France that specializes in animation. Their student work typically puts even the best production studios to shame. Yes, in some regards, I would argue that some of these shorts are better than the ones made by Pixar. There’s a lot of variety, fresh colors, and an obvious attention given to traditional media.

But the name of the game when you’re making a short is overlap. If you can learn how to do that, I think you’re golden. And keeping things short — really short — seems to help too.

It’s hardly even possible to make a best-of list. Browse around the archive. They’re all good. But here’s a few for the same of having pictures on the page.

Philip Toledano

from the photo set "Days With My Father"

So today, I came across photographer Philip Toledano who does great work, sure, but there’s really not much you can say about really good photography. It’s like looking at a bunch of mirrors; you only really see yourself.

SignalNoise: The Blog of James White

What a fine image you make, Mr. White…

The Harvest

I’m taking a trip to europe starting next week. one of the places i might go is Taunton Somerset where i have relatives. I found this delightful short film that shows off its landscape and what looks like the place where they make apple cider, or maybe beer. It’s hard to say.

3Deluxe

I ran in to someone’s portfolio today that rocked my face off, and saw in their notes that they worked for a company called 3Deluxe. Upon further inspection, I was happy to see that this studio did the Apartment website back in the mid 90s which I was really fond of when I was young. Really out there, and cool, and high tech — not too many sites worked completely in shockwave in those days. So it’s no surprise that they’re website is bleeding edge enough that you might have to eat some cookies to bring your blood sugar levels back up. Everything about this site is perfect.

and the work they do is just downright incredible. who can say they designed an underwater hotel? i mean.. come on.

The Science For CG & Shaders Used in Cloud With A Chance of Meatballs

Two articles were recently put online, and they have a lot in common, so I suggest you read them both.

First up, “Science for CG” was originally a series of posts made on the cgtalk forums, and were recompiled for ease of reading by someone over at subdivisionmodeling.com. The result is a roughhousing of a lighting and optics physics textbook and a tips n’ tricks tutorial with glossy pictures. The explanation of BDRF with cubes is very cool.

Second, the shader artists who worked on the recently released Cloud With A Chance of Meatballs talk about how they’re expertise in the area of CG shading (like in the first article) combined with previous experience in photography made for a good match when it came to working in CG film.

Next post, I’ll be in Europe rubbing elbows with Blender geeks!

Verve Magazine Writes About The MAP

The Media Arts Project website got a revamp this summer (and the party was awesome by the way). It’s a good site, much like a mix between monster.com, deviantart.com, and a few other things all in one. What impresses me endlessly is that The MAP site has support for things other than still images so you can put up your audio, video, and flash.

Devid Revoy: Digital Painting With Open Source

Really you could do all this with any program that strikes your fancy. If you have twenty minutes to spare, watch this!

Used in this video: The GIMP, Alchemy, & MyPaint. I wonder if David would like Rhonda…

Back to Schhool

Crap.

Thats all I can really say.  Go away school.  I was having fun golfing and going to the beach before you got here.  Now you’re here and I find myself waking up before 11 and now Im thinking about bed at 9:19.

summer summary

Ok, I guess Im ready for school to be back.  Dont get me wrong, my summer was fun-filled with sailing and making fun of yancey – but i feel like i should be doing more tooo you know, advance myself.  Because you see making fun of yancey is fun and  simple – but its not exactly landing me a job.

It’s my senior year (time to get down).  And Im going to get down.  I have started thinking about my undergrad research and ive concluded (after reconsidering furniture design for a brief moment) that I am going to do a documentary on Asheville.  Everyone reading this (you you you) should go to our site and tell us how much we suck.  Me and a hairy man named adam (history grad) are teaming up for this one with high hopes.  I will call upon all of you to help me… (especially you).

Ifff you havent noticed we also have a feature article on unca.edu.  Your name (or face) might be there somewhere… – and if you haven’t heared yet unca is redesigning their website.  They are having some sneak peak listening sessions this week around lunchtime with a new look at some of the new advances they have made on the site – i plan on taking a date (me and kristen are complicated right now).  Soo you should come with me.

Im sure we will have a MAC meeting shortly and give an update on things.  One thing I plan on trying to do this spring is have a multi-club water fight on the quad.  I kind of see it going down like this:

Also, those processing peoples out there should check out this competition.  Your sketch has to have only 200 characters and it has to be cool.  I havent touched processing since curts internet art class but i may dabble and see what I come up with for this.

Well fellow countrymen and women Im off to bed.  No drinky tonight – i have school in the morning.  I hoope you all had a good summer and are ready to see my face on a consistent basis.  Good Day.

i said GOOD DAY!

Three Frames

Three Frames .net is entertaining. It’s also makes me realize that normal screen captures from movies just don’t say anything. If a picture of a frame is worth a thousand words, three frames is worth a whole chapter.

Note: If you’re using Firefox, and you can’t stand the madness, the trusty Stop button kills animated gifs.

OS X: Use an image as your color palette

For most graphics programs in the Adobe suite the operating system’s color picker goes unused. Flash, still holding on to a lot of its Macromedia-isms still has a button to pick colors in this old fashioned way. Normally, particularly on windows, this would be a bad thing. But oh, what’s this? That ugly color spectrum can be replaced with another image?!

this menu lets you import a 198x184 image as your color palette

Yep. That’s pretty cool, and I can already think of a few (im)practical uses! I’d be interested in seeing anyone else trying this. Attach a screenshot with Command+Shift+4

What Is A Bezier Curve, Really?

Unsuspectingly I learned what a Bezier curve truly is by attending a talk on four dimensional math. Though the Bezier, which you might know better as the “curve tool” or as the “pen tool” or as its proper pronunciation the “beh-zee-aye” is a heck of a lot simpler than you ever would have guessed.

One bezier curve is nothing more than a quarter circle inside of a trapezoid where the handles are 5/9ths (or 55%) out.

Really you can sort of imagine that curves follow a “half” rule if you imagine a box that envelopes each quarter circle, but it’s useful to know that you need to push those handles just a little further to get the full effect.

It might seem terribly nerdy at this point, but the next time you start drawing with curves, this information really comes in handy. The model is only an artistic tool however. Bezier curves are actually much uglier in their mechanics, and give me a flashback to 3rd grade graph paper exercises.

Personally, I prefer the quarter-circle model. Though the above diagram is mathematically correct, it’s a lot harder to come to terms with a curve that seems so hard to imagine as circular. The circle, after all, is a powerful design element that we all push towards and like to think about.

With any luck, the newer and easier Spiro Curve will soon be overtaking the place of the bezier, but that’s another blog post.

HTML 5

The browser wars are far from over. Technologies like Java applets, Quicktime, and Flash long dominated the media side of web. Originally, writing web pages was a lot more about being able to copy source code from others, and grow. As of this week, the World Wide Web Consortium’s newest toy has full support by all four of your favourite browsers.  Safari 4.0, Firefox 3.5, Chrome 3.0 (not yet released), & Opera 9.6 partnered with Open Source initiatives are all about to drop a bomb on proprietary media solutions. Welcome to your miniature guide to Way back when the web was young, HTML4 was like the zenith of easy to learnweb page lingo. While XHTML was a stricter variant on HTML that was designed to put pressure on browser developers, it didn’t offer many new features. Companies like Macromedia & Sun flourished in the nonsense that has been the browser wars, and indeed many people still use Internet Explorer as their primary browser. Nevertheless, let’s look at the differences between HTML4 and HTML5 and what it will mean for the future of web page design.

Added Features (in order of awesomeness)

• <canvas> : like a Processing sketch that allows 2D graphics drawing. With enough effort, you can pull off full flash-like animation without any plugin whatsoever. Links: Cheatsheet \ Examples
• <video> : no more embeds or objects! Looks just like an <img> and allows parameters for differenct sizes when zoomed and not zoomed. Youtube is already trying it!
• <audio> : no more making a flash movie just to play an mp3. works just like the video tag and supports ogg vorbis.
• Note: Both the audio and video tags are being held back for their ogg support due to Apple & Nokia apposing the file format. Link
• <header> <nav> <article> <section> <aside> <footer> : the new building blocks for pages meant to save you on div tags with complex alignment css. Links: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5
• <a> : pinging was added in the attributes so that a server can be notified when you access a link. Kind of creepy…
• <time> : Finally browsers might start to automagically switch times that are out of your time zone so that you can read them properly if this tag is used with some extra zazz. Can be used for dates too.
• tabindex : an attribute that can be added now to anything for ease of tabbing through elements
• hidden : another attribute usable on anything that saves you from using style=”visibility:hidden;”
• Drag & Drop API : meaning web applications will feel more like real applications while uploading & downloading.
• Offline Storage Database : better than cookies
• Document Editing : not sure what that means, but it sounds good, and has to do with the contenteditable attribute

Removed Features (in order of sadness)

• <center> : sometimes I just don’t know any other way to force things to center-align. Oh well, stylesheets will just have to do. *tear*
• <font> : Oh font tag, what times we had in olden days and you filled my code as if you were blades of grass in a field of summer time.
• <strike> : I’m not sure anyone uses that stupid tag anymore. Seems about as useful as blink.

To sum up, web browsing is getting a lot more streamlined. Firefox & Chrome are using a new engine for running javascript that’s nearly 100 times faster than the previous method, which is what is allowing for crazy things like the canvas tag. Take a look at Processing.js, &  Chrome Experiments for more canvas goodies.

Pod Bless America

Another day I’ll see how many people I can rally up to convince Charter to give Asheville Current_TV, but while most of you are elsewhere right now, consider participating in their 4th of july event. Current TV is a pretty hip TV channel where most of the content is viewer submitted, so hollidays like this one bring out the true spirit. It’s like public access meets threadless.com meets true blue american freedom. I highly recommend it.

Use Actionscript 3.0 And Don’t Look Back

Actionscript 3 is nearly three years old now, and though CS4 hasn’t done much to help the fact that code and art are still very strictly separated, it hasn’t seemed to stop crafty multimedia artists from taking the language by the horns. Papervision has blossomed in to a respectable 3D engine and every day more sites are using it meaning that plenty of artists are willing to take the dive in to hard core programming to keep up. In other words, so should you, and the department too. Actionscript 3 isn’t going to wait around for anyone, and before you know it, it will be 4.0

Compared to your Playstation, these graphics might seem familiar, or not even that impressive, but considering that 3D in flash is nothing but a huge open source hack, and that documentation is terribly verbose and online tutorials a few and far between, it’s pretty amazing that it’s come this far in the past few years. As with any cheap technological upgrade, corporate websites have already jumped on to the bleeding Flash edge, meaning that design firms are too, meaning that coming out college … you get the idea.

Oh, and I’ll have to think up something snazzy for the 4th.

Paul Debevec: Live 3D Teleconferencing

As a brief preface, Paul Debevec is my hero, and if I make it to Siggraph this year I want to fulfill a long awaited dream to shake his hand. Alas, this isn’t a computer graphics research blog, nor is it a Paul Debevec fan club. Today though, it is. I think he’s really outdone himself this time. Not only is this just an intriguing leap towards science fiction video holograms (this uses no hologram), but Debevec is moving more towards projects that help regular people, are slightly lower tech (compared to the light stage) for home/business installation ease. Even though the projector was hacked to run at 5,000 frames per second (that’s not a typo), the process of overclocking projectors he’s said is pretty simple as long as you don’t mind doing away with color, and the remarks in the FAQ suggest that DLP projectors could restore color.

I could go on… just watch the video, and after you’re finished pooping your pants write something in the comments.

The 2009 Webby Awards in A Nutshell

The Webby Awards of 2009 have come and gone. As with most award ceremonies, plenty of folks won awards that no one has ever heard of. I don’t intend to bore you, and don’t actually know much about the whole Webby phenomenon, but it’s worth looking over.

Twitter, no surprise, won an award for being the “Breakout of the Year”. Everybody and their dog has a twitter these days. Personally, I haven’t yet succumbed.

R/GA won an award as the most accomplished design firm. Their video on how design firms have worked in the past, present and will in the future was eye-opening.

And of course, a few other people got awards but generally when the Webby’s come around not you or I or anybody else really needs to care — just like the oscars.

Torrent Raiders: A Torrent Client Videogame

Not much of a game, Torrent Raiders is a sort of interactive Torrent downloader plus visuazliser that doubles as a social commentary on the culture of illegal downloading. This is internet art in its purest form.

VizualPV3D

VisualPV3D is nothing but an swf file, and a few folders of XML and Actionscript 3. What it can do is pretty unheard of. Just as you’d think from the picture below, it does full 3D modeling and texturing, but what’s crazier is it’s output. Not only are the visuals within VPV3D running in Papervision, but it’s a 1-to-1 editor for Papervision files. Essentially, a bunch of Actionscript 3 that writes Actionscript 3. Or to put it another way: Flash 3D, done in Flash.

The City Museum in St. Louis

Want a summer trip filled with metal, art, daring climbs, flashlights, and fish? I know I do. I’ve heard nothing but awesome things about the City Museum in St. Louis. Three of my friends have gone and loved it. I hope to go soon. It seems like a good way to take a break from the computers for us multimedia folk. Here’s my favorite quote on the subject from the museum’s site:

“What happens when you mix two Saber 40 aircraft fuselages, a fire engine, a castle turret, a 25′ tall cupola and several 4′ wide wrought-iron slinkies, and the creativity of CITY MUSEUM Creative Director Bob Cassilly and his crew? The result is MonstroCity, the most monumental, monolithic, monstrous montage of monkey bars in the world.”

On some blog, I’ve also seen it called a “Disneyland killer” and an “art theme park … with secret passageways inside secret passageways.”

On Friday and Saturday nights, you can go from 11pm-1am when they turn out the lights and give everyone flashlights.

Here is a list of some of their eclectic attractions:

Enchanted Caves
MonstroCity
World Aquarium
Art City
Museum of Mirth, Mystery, and Mayhem
Tiny Train Town Model Railroad
Circus
Renovated architectural relics
Vintage Opera Poster collection
Wurlitzer Pipe Organ
Ball Pit
Shoelace Factory
The World’s Largest Pencil

Apparently new this summer, they’ve opened up the roof. You can get in the bus that’s hanging off the edge, ride a vintage four-story ferris wheel, and get into what looks to be plenty of other cool stuff.

Have you seen City of Lost Children? Yeah, I’m imagining it as something like that only with happier children.

The photo tour on the City Museum website is nice. Here are some other pictures I found online. Anyone want to go with me? Road trip! It’s only 9-10 hours!

Check out the next Bob Cassilly work here. Who doesn’t love cement?

Check out the City Museum on Facebook, too. Tons of fun pictures.

HD Camcorders with 35mm Lens Adapters

2009 is going to be the year when camcorders finally shed themselves of magnetic tape, of interlacing, and of NTSC colorspace. Video artists have been pained by these outdated technologies for long enough. Just this quarter, JVC, Panasonic, and Sony, have all released hand-sized, less-than-a-pound HD camcorders that are capable of the true 1080 progressive scan resolution.

1080p for $200

If you’re willing to buy one without a hard drive the price tags even drop closer to $500 or in sony’s case in the picture above $200, as apposed to the $5,000 pricetags seen for 1080p HD cameras nearly a year ago. Case in point, digital is meeting the mark of film. Especially with 4k on the way, which is rather scary.

So what makes a big huge camera so much better still when the technology is obviously decreasing its size and portability? I can tell you it’s no fun carrying around a seven pound camera all day long. especially with a tripod.

Remember me?

The answer isn’t the 3 CCD technology. As I stated above, smaller CCDs are proving to leap ahead of older CCDs. It’s not the microphone because typically when you check out this bohemuth you also get an external mic. It’s not the menus and options because they’re just as clumsy as any video camera. Arguably small consumer cameras have more user-friendly interfaces and touchscreens, and *gasp* LCD panels which my Canon XL-1s does NOT sport.

The reason you want a big camera is because it has a longer lens, and “better glass”.

So just imagine what happens when you buy a lens for a 35mm camera and stick it to a little HD camera. You get something that feels less like a camera and a bit more like a video bazooka. But check out the stuff below, and maybe you’ll think about taking up some of your summer to build an adapter. The results certainly are rewarding.

What you see in the video above is not any kind of filter. It’s raw footage. Some of that magic is explained below with what I leave you with: a medley of the best introductory videos I know of.

4 Minute Film School covers the 35mm adapter

Matthieu Bessudo

Strongly contrasting my obsession with color the past few months, UK artist “mc bess” has a real talent for, well, practically everything. How often does the lead of a small band make a music video that’s MTV-worthy? A good way to kick off your week-end. Watch this, and if you have to check out his website, hit on all the links. Every facet is filled to the brim.

Matthieu is getting upwards of 10,300+ hits on this video a day right now due to it getting picked up on a number of popular surf-club websites and it’s likely on digg too. In the case that the embedded video is not HD by the time you reach the link, it’s because he ran out of off-vimeo-HD (which costs money). Just so you know, it is HD, and you should watch it on a nice screen with speakers.

Colorflip: Amazing for about 5 minutes

Highly recommended in FULLSCREEN mode (F11 on PC / Fn+F11 on Mac)

YooouuuTuuube

It’s official. Sending people links to videos through yooouuutuuube is infinitely more amusing than sending people links through the regular style youtube. Just remember that every sounding vowel gets three per, and you’ll be away in to blissfully griddy goodness.

Have a sampler pack 1 2 3 4 5

Advice from Pixar: How to Create a Demo Reel

After reading this article on how to make a demo reel, I wished I had read it sooner as I’ve been trying to put one together the last week or two. Plenty of the things in the write-up you’ve heard before like “put your best work in the first minute.” but hearing it from someone who made it at Pixar, the same advice means a little more.

Durian

A durian, for starters, is an ugly bad smelling fruit that’s considered to be the most delicious once you get in to the middle of it. The Blender Foundation’s last three open movie projects were named after fruits too, but this time around the code-name is very fitting. What Durian hopes to achieve is not only an incredibly high quality visual, but also a means to finishing the 2.5x project which will have recoded Blender completely from scratch in less than a year’s time.

• High detail multi-res modeling (sculpting) and render (micropolygons?)
• Fire/smoke/volumetrics & explosions
• Compositing using tiles/regions, so it becomes resolution independent
• Crowd/massive simulation (fix animation system to allow duplicates)
• Improve library system for managing complex projects
• Deliver in 4k digital cinema (depending agreement with sponsor)
• Make the Blender 2.5x series fully production ready.

Applications to join the team are due in June 10th. The project starts on September 1st, and ends some time next March.

The bottom line: This time next year, Blender is going to be kicking some serious @%$.

Hobnox Audiotool

I’m not sure what’s stranger, trying to control a TB-303 through a web interface, or the fact that trying to work the buttons on a real TB-303 is really cryptic in the first place and that people still seem to think that reincarnating one on the screen is a good idea. Feed your contemplation further with this link. Nevertheless, Audiotool is a lot like being able to play with the real thing so that you too can make music that sounds like it came straight from 1997. I’m not too impressed with the recent addition of the monome clone  since it has nothing more than an audio out. Ah well… at least they’re trying. The fact that this is running in Flash is amazing.

But to quote the inventor of the TB-303, in a bit of a twist of irony (taken from the link above):

It is important that the manufacturing side concentrate on providing “useful” devices to meet creative wishes. It is not the proper role of a manufacturer to demand that the artist perform totally new playing methods. That would merely be an attempt to exploit novelty devices that had been dreamed up by arrogant designers.

Using the Audiotool, under this train of thought, is really clumsy, and not very practical. If you’re looking for some eye candy though, Audiotool delivers. Operating the TB-303 is hillariously difficult. Nathan’s video also sort of includes a tutorial around the 6:00 minute mark.

Post-Semester Clean-Up With Treemapping

Typically I am pretty good about backing up everything that was on my multimedia server space, but I think last semester I forgot. So here’s a reminder to anyone and everyone to back up your stuff. Whether or not you’re graduating, it’s stuff you don’t want to lose by accident.

To help out with the effort, I want to share my favourite hard disk cleanup utility: Spacemonger!

This method of visualizing data is known as Treemapping, in case you wanted to know… But I promise you that the wikipedia entry on the subject isn’t that interesting.

There’s a lesser equivalent for OS X called Disk Inventory X, that doesn’t show the names of folders in the boxes and has a really tacky color scheme.

Computers Club: A Club for Computers

Ego nd Id

Some Zany Internet Art!!

http://www.computersclub.org/