Archive for September, 2007

The Swedish game-magazine Level had a nice article about the relationship between art and games in their July 2007 issue. This article contained an interview with me about the game Rorschach, where I collaborated with Ida Rödén to make a small art-game. This game has been shown in a number of more “traditional” art-forums, for example at Umeå Konsthögskola and the M.A.D.E. festival. Art and games has always had a slightly weird relasionship and as usual opinions drift apart. Personally I see interactivity as the key word, and Rorschach tries to explore the interactivity of conversations; something that games in general have been pretty unsuccessful in.

Rorschach is now available for download and can be found at http://www.collectingsmiles.com/rorschach.

Posted: September 26th, 2007 under Art, Game design, Projects.
Comments: 2

I just saw the first batch of reviews on Halo 3. That’s amazing. I never though they would score that great. On top of that Bioshock turned out to be incredibly as well. It’s a good time to be a gamer. While waiting to get my hands on Halo, I wanted to talk a bit about a game that’s close to my heart:

Pokémon. Yes, you heard me right, the Gotta catch’em all one. Every time I talk to someone about this game I get the same thing.
- Pokémon? Are you serious? Isn’t that a children’s game?
Well, maybe, but it’s still one of the finest RPG ever created. Not many people around me have tried this game but the few I’ve managed to convince to try it out have never been disappointed, so I don’t think I’m wrong here. So why is it that so few people try it out? Well, I shouldn’t really say few people, with 10 million or so children (or Japanese people) get their regular fix with this game. But why so few adult gamers? Pokémon always score well on reviews with the latest one scoring 85%. This score should at least get people curious to try it out, but still I don’t see it. It’s definitely not a problem with marketing, since I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t know what Pokémon is. Still, no luck. So, what is it? Are we really so uptight and rigid that we don’t give something great a chance just because it’s a bit childish? Or am I just missing something?

Posted: September 25th, 2007 under Games.
Comments: 2

Colors! v1.06 is now released.

Colors! is a simplistic digital application for Nintendo DS based on modern painting-techniques developed for drawing tablets in programs like Photoshop. By taking advantage of the pressure sensitivity of the DS touch-screen it becomes a perfect portable digital sketch-book.

Current features
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Hard and soft circular brush
Pressure-sensitivity can affect opacity and brush-size
512×384 image resolution with 2 stage zoom
Replay the whole painting process of an image
Hue-circle and luminance and saturation-triangle style palette
Load and Save to memory card
Send painting as e-mail using Wi-Fi

Major updates in v1.06
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Major precision overhaul
Opacity slider in brush-screen
Pressure-Controls-Size option in brush-screen
New user-interface with graphics by madwurmz.com
Playback controls with the option to continue painting from mid-playback
The possibility to send your painting directly to an e-mail address
Unlimited save slots
One additional zoom-level

Available at http://www.collectingsmiles.com/colors

Enjoy!

Posted: September 19th, 2007 under Projects.
Comments: 294