I stumbled across an amazing photo of a kingfisher diving for its dinner, taken by photographer Adrian Groves with a Canon 40D camera. Though I can no longer show you here due to copyright issues...

Groves set up a tank of minnows as bait, camouflaged with some netting, and then hid out, waiting for the kingfisher to appear. When it finally did, the Canon 40D (with a 70-200f2.8L IS lens, set at f/8, 1/1000 seconds) managed to shoot the kingfisher diving for a feed. I can't stop looking at it—the orange feathers make it look like it's on fire.

Now I want a 40D. And a pet kingfisher. [TrekNature via Telegraph and Daily Mail]

UPDATE: images had to be removed due to copyright issues, but you can click over here if you want to see them all.

This is an experiment by Justin Windle aka Soulwire created as a result of a project where Justin needed to find a way of simulating digital interference on an image / video stream. Instead of using the graphics API or Bitmap effects, Justin resorted to the real thing.

The principle is incredibly simple. Corrupt / alter a byte (or several bytes) in the ByteArray of a JPEG and then load this back into a DisplayObject using Loader.loadBytes(). Because of the way in which JPEGs work, the image will still display but the corrupt bytes will mangle the output to varying degrees, depending on how many bytes have been corrupted. The result is an interesting glitch pattern, a bit like those which were accidentally created when my webcam drivers lost the plot. Read more..

An AIR app may be in the works, in the meantime you can download the source here.

Justin is an artist, designer and creative technologist living and working in London. You can find out more by visiting his website or his blog for latest project updates.

(via @zenbullets)

See also Digital Decay [Reference, Theory] article on CAN by Richard Almond.

• History of Video Games [Flash]
• Satromizer [iPhone]
• Generative Engine [Flash]
• Íonz / Digital Persona [WebApp, Flash]
• Simple Metronome [iPhone, Flash]
• Supershapes [Flash, Hype]

The results of the Assemblee Competition are in! The winner of Part Two is Ivan Safrin for Bitworld, a really slick action-oriented roguelike that was made in Ivan’s own development framework, Substance (still under-wraps). He made use of a number of people’s work from Part One: Oddball, Oryx, Rynen10k, Blot, Stian Stark, Saros, BigLon. A hearty congrats, dude!

As you can see here, it was a pretty close competition, with a lot of great entries. I noticed quite a few entries made it on to 1up’s 101 Free Games of 2010, among other places. Here are the top ten finishers (with brief and inadequate synopses):

1. Bitworld 72 votes (7.9%) – slick 2d/3d roguelike
2. Dungeons of Fayte 63 votes (6.9%) – co-op action/RPG
3. Realm of the Mad God 57 votes (6.2%) – massively multiplayer fantasy
4. Mr. Kitty’s Quest 51 votes (5.6%) – explorey action adventure game
5. BirdyWorld 38 votes (4.2%) – Zelda-like where players create the world as they explore
6. Backworld 33 votes (3.6%) – platformer about painting
7. Tiny Crawl 33 votes (3.6%) – streamlined room-based RPG
8. s h i n e 32 votes (3.5%) – survival horror
9. The King, the Queen and the Jester 29 votes (3.2%) – first person dungeon crawl
10. Great Dungeon in the Sky 27 votes (3%) – platform game with many characters

Please check out the full list of Assemblee games if you haven’t already. Lots of gems in there.

The winner of Part One was Oryx, for his Lo-Fi Fantasy Tileset, which was used in many a game (including Bitworld). As stated before, all of the art and music for Part One is now available (image-heavy) for you to use in your own (non-commercial) projects. They have been released by their creators under a Creative Commons license.

TIGForums mod and Pokemans-lover extraordinaire Melly also held a Box Art Competition after Part Two, which turned out some more cool stuff.

I loved this competition. I think it definitely proved that a two-part competition can be very successful. Logistically, I’m going to have to do more planning for large volumes of entries. I was really unprepared for all the awesome that was going to come in, and that led to some delays. Thanks to everyone who participated, and congratulations to everyone who finished artwork, music, or a game!

ProLoop is an audio loop playing and sound experimentation app from Trapcode. It features a pretty cool looking interface that shows the waveform of each loop as it plays. It can play up to 6 loops and you can mix and pan each independantly. Where ProLoop shines is it’s ability to mangle your loops by repitching them or performing various modulations on them (using other loops as a modulation source). You can also pitch shift loops by musical amounts, and you have control over quantization. It comes bundled with an assortment of strange loops and offers the ability to load your own loops. Other looping apps, such as Looptastic also let you play and mix loops (with an easier interface), but ProLoop should appeal to experimental, ambient, and noise oriented folks who like to play with sounds live.

Peder of Trapcode sent us 5 promocodes to giveaway. If you would like one, please leave a comment below and we’ll random pick 5 people tomorrow.

About Trapcode:
Trapcode makes software for visual effects and motion graphics. Started in 2001 by Peder Norrby the focus is on creating groundbreaking, robust technology that is easy to start using for beginners and has many complex features for advanced users.

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0
Cost: $4.99
Developer: Trapcode

See also Slice [iPhone, Sound] by The Strange Agency

• Auditorium [iPhone, Sound, Games]
• Slice [iPhone, Sound]
• Star6 [iPhone, Sound]
• Physical Sequencer aka Thump [oF, Sound, iPhone]
• Euphonics [iPhone, Sound]
• Tonetable [iPhone]

Super Mario Bros. X is a nice Mario fan game that mixes primarily elements from Super Mario Bros. 3 and World into one fine package (but you can also find some stuff from Super Mario Bros. 1, 2 and the classic Mario Bros). On top of that you get also a great working 2 player co-op mode!
So you have two options: You can either play it with a friend or try to master it alone by playing both Mario and Luigi at the same time by yourself (like i did as you can see from the video).
Maybe change the controls to control the characters independantly or leave the default settings alone which means that you control both Mario and Luigi simultanously with the arrow keys…
Fun!
Also watch the Trailer from the developer of the game to see some more stuff in action.

Moreover I recommend to check out the other carefully selected Mario related Games on Pixel Prospector

[View with PicLens]

Link to Gameplay Video

Link to Trailer

GunFu Deadlands is a fun and challenging action game that does a good job of capturing the spirit of the Old West showdowns we’ve all admired on the silver screen. The player aims with the mouse and can do a John Woo-style bullet-time dive by pressing the right mouse button. This is an essential move for getting the jump on bad guys, who fire on sight and from long distances.

It’s extremely gratifying to kill enemy cowboys in both bullet-time and real-time when the bullets are flying so fast and deadly. Somehow creator Christiaan Janssen figured out all the necessary ingredients for a Western shoot-out and distilled them into a tight little package. GunFu Deadlands even comes with a level editor to make your own OK Corral to share with friends.

One Button Bob is a single-button action game in which you have to help Bob survive an obstacle course to reach the treasure he desires. The control scheme is switched around in every room, meaning that you could be running away from a boulder, climbing a set of ladders or jumping from one platform to another as you venture further into the cave.

It takes about ten or fifteen minutes to finish the entire adventure, and there isn't really any incentive to replay it after you've completed your quest.

Game educator Lewis Pulsipher delivers a list of useful maxims for game design -- simple rules to ponder that will help you on the road to creating a game your players will enjoy.

So hey. Back in December I finished up a 1.0 port of Smiles for Netbooks, and sent it to Intel by their early contest deadline.

And hey, guess what?

Advice: whenever somebody asks for a photo, send a square one, even if they don't ask for square.

Link here.

Second place! That’s awesome.

So hey, what does 2nd place actually mean?

Yes, I won a car by making games. That's just... wow!

Wow. So I guess I’ve got a pretty good story now when mingling at GDC.

I’ll post some photos once it arrives.

Woohoo!

Been a bit quiet around here, eh?

As I mentioned in my New Year’s post, I’ve been kind of taking a break lately. Haven’t really been doing much of anything to write about to be honest. Waiting for inspiration to hit me.

Well, it’s starting to hit. A few weeks ago, I talked to Shawn Pucknell about speaking at FiTC Toronto. So I needed to come up with a subject to talk about. Up to now, I’ve almost always done a brand new talk for every conference I’ve spoken at. Really, the only exceptions are when the organizers explicitly ask me to do a specific talk. But it seems that most speakers are doing the same talk at multiple events these days. Many do the same talk for a year, or a good part of thereof, at every conference they speak at.

I used to be opposed to this idea. I felt like it was lazy. For sure, coming up with a brand new talk and all the slides and examples that go with that, for every conference, sure is a lot more work. But I was talking to a few speakers late last year (specifically Grant and Mario while in Tokyo in November) and started to get a new viewpoint on the subject. These guys are anything but lazy about their presentations. Even though they are doing the same basic talk each time, they are constantly revising and tweaking it based on audience reaction and feedback, pacing, personal experience, new data, etc. Doing the same presentation more than once allows you to get better and better at that presentation. One part didn’t go so well? Drop it or change it? Went too long in one section? Figure out how to shorten it. Randomly run across some new graphic or example that is perfect for the subject? Squeeze it in there for next time.

On the other hand, when you do a new talk each time, you get one shot to make it good, and the next time, you’re onto something new and get one shot at that.

There’s also audience logistics that come into play. Again, I used to think that doing the same talk multiple times would be boring for the audience. But not everyone goes to every conference. If I do a talk in Brighton next year and that’s the only place I do it, there are a lot of people who might be very interested in it, but don’t happen to be at that conference, and will never hear it. And as for those people who seem to be at every conference, well, once they’ve seen your talk, they are free for the rest of the year to check out other speakers during your time slots. I know there have been plenty of times for me when there were two or more presentations going on in the same slot that I really wanted to see. I would be unhappy thinking that when I choose to miss one that I was really interested in, that’s the last shot I’ll ever get to see that particular talk.

So with that said, allow me to introduce my talk for 2010, “Programming Art”.

As you may know, in July 2008 I started a site called Art From Code. Algorithmic and generative art has, since I first started programming, been one of my biggest passions. In the old BIT-101 lab, I called them “experiments” but they were really quick and dirty interactive art pieces. Art From Code was an attempt to continue some of that same spirit, but with more focus on static images and less on the code behind them. I know that not providing the code for the pieces, and not making them interactive was a huge negative in many people’s eyes, but for me it was somehow very liberating and opened up my creative flood gates for a good six months. Then I got hooked on iPhone programming, and … well that’s another story.

So, while I was trying to figure out what to do next in my extracurricular programming life, one of the options was diving back into art. Another was to do more with games. I find game programming very fascinating. It has many of the same creative aspects as programming art, but in the end, I tend to get much more bogged down into the details of architecture and story line and level creation, and before long even the most exciting game idea becomes a chore to finish. With art it’s always fresh. Short iteration times and when you just publish the result, no bug reports!

Anyway, I decided I wanted to do more generative art again, but didn’t want to limit myself to just ActionScript and Flash. There were a lot of different tools and frameworks that I knew about and had dabbled with, that I thought would be fun to eventually try out more in depth. Stuff like Processing and Open Frameworks, but also lesser known stuff like Context Free Art, Structure Synth, Nodebox, and Toolbox, among others. I figured, what better time to dig into them but now, when I had nothing else particular going on anyway? And if I based my 2010 talk on them, that would keep me focused on them for quite a while. Enough to get to know each one really, really well by the end of the year. And so, that’s what my Programming Art talk will be about. Here’s the blurb:

As soon as computers had visual displays or printouts, people were using them to create art. In this presentation we’ll take a short look at the history of computer generated art, and a hands-on walk through of several of the available programs and languages used for that purpose today, including Flash, Processing, Structure Synth, NodeBox, Context Free, Open Frameworks, and maybe others.

I’ll be debuting the talk at FiTC Toronto in April, most likely doing it at Multi-Mania in Belgium in May, and then again at FlashBelt in Minneapolis in June. Those are the only conferences I’ve yet committed to speaking at in 2010. If I’m not totally bored with the talk, I don’t get rotten fruit thrown at me, and I get invited to speak anywhere else after that, I’ll probably do it a few more times.

Out of the talks I’ve given, one of my own personal favorites was my Art From Code talk at FiTC Amsterdam just about a year ago. I definitely plan to incorporate certain parts of that talk into Programming Art, before exploring the different tools.

I think it’s going to be a fun year!

Motion blur! It doesn't just ruin photos. It's also something that can be used for artistic effect, when done properly. And for the results of this week's Shooting Challenge, we've got 117 photographers who did just that.

First Runner Up

This is my favorite Korg, and I thought this would be pretty cool to capture "In motion!"
I used a Canon Rebel T1I
f/25
20 Second Exposure
18-55mm Lens (shot at 27mm)
ISO 100
Developed in Lightroom2
And my lighting was a small fluorescent tube light, the size you would put in a closet and such... -Marcel Maynard

Second Runner Up

Camera:Canon EOS REBEL T1i
Lens: 18-55m F/3.5
Exposure:3.2
Aperture:f/22.0
Focal Length:28 mm
ISO Speed:100
Exposure Bias:-1/3 EV
-Shant Meguerdichian

Winner

Camera: Canon S90
Shutter Speed: 0.81 sec
Aperture: F/8
Focal Length 6mm
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 step
-David McGibbon

Cowboykilla is an action platformer with emphasis on getting a nice hiscore by killing hundreds of enemies. Helpful on your side: Fine weaponry (pistol, shotgun, sword, baseball bat, chainsaw…)

The game is a collaboration between Andrew Brophy and Banov and is made for the YoYoGames Comp 05

Banov:

“The game doesn’t have an official title yet but we’ve been calling it “CowboyKilla.” It’s an awesome hardcore bloodbath where you’re pitted against an unending army of enemies with a lot of sweet weapons at your disposal. It’s ridiculously fun, and development is going at a very good pace.”

[View with PicLens]

Link to Gameplay Video (PixelProspector)

Link to Gameplay Video (Andrew Brophy)