You can get Alien Swarm for free on Steam starting today. Alien Swarm is a 4 person co-op adventure with an updated Source engine and the ability to create custom levels. Think of this as a top view Left 4 Dead or Killing Floor, but with aliens. Too bad they are not zombie aliens, but it's a free game so we can't complain.
If only all bicycles were as twisty and malleable as Gumby- they'd be easier to lock up, and much easier to transport. Wait a sec. Perhaps there is a such a bike, after all.
Here's a little inspiration for the aspiring fashion designers out there. Having majored in textile design (printing and weaving), I am totally stunned by these West African ritual garments.
Atlanta based designers Amy Flurry and Nikki Salk collaborate on some fantastic paper installations, which are “fueled by a love of fashion and an appreciation of grace and nuance of this humble material.”
Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite 3, or CS3, is the industry-standard application for digital photo manipulation. It is ideal for professional photographers, serious amateur photographers, and graphic designers. Having the software, however, isn't enough; you'll need to know how to use it. In this CS3 tutorial, you'll learn how to distress text edges in Adobe Photoshop CS3. Distress text edges in Photoshop CS3.
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our tutorials, post to the community corkboard, and come play on our free server!
Just as Smule's ocarina app yields the gentle sounds of a woodwind instrument by simply blowing into an iPhone, Squeal promises to emit theremin-esque noises from the iPad with easy fingerplay. Developed as a collaboration between Hong Kong musician/producer/composer Gaybird Leung and interactive designer Henry Chu, the musical app is a work-in-progress for Henry's ongoing experimental music project Digital Hug.
The New Yorker profiles Shigeru Miyamoto, the father of modern video games, whose spawn includes world-changing classics such as Mario and Legend of Zelda:
Fashion designer Manel Torres has teamed up with scientists at Imperial College London and designers at the Royal College of Art to invent spray-on clothing, an instant, sprayable, non-woven fabric-in-a-can.
I'd take one of these:
Wow, hair school gets crazy-awesome at CuldeSac and Studio Marisol. How do I enroll? "In cooperation with Vitra Design Museum and the Centre Georges Pompidou, C.I.R.E.C.A. (Centre International de Recherche et d'Education Culturelle et Agricole) has been putting on an international summer academy at Domaine de Boisbuchet since 1996.
On October 7th, the IndieCade Conference will open its doors to some of the most innovative minds in the independent gaming industry. The three day event located in Culver City, California includes presentations by notable indie designers, workshops, galleries, and mixers. On the following day, however, the IndieCade Festival begins. Unlike the conference, the festival includes events targeted at gamers and the general public. While a $15 wristband will grant you access to keynotes, events, a...
Big news from the world of game development engines. For several years, Unity3D has been the free 3D game development engine of choice for aspiring and indie game designers around the world. While it isn't as powerful as Unreal Engine 3 or CryEngine, it's free and much easier to use. Now, according to an announcement made by Unity yesterday, Unity 3D is about to unleash a huge weapon that neither of those other engines can claim: Flash compatibility.
Fatherhood is difficult, especially when you're an octopus. That is the moral of the 2011 IGF Student Showcase winner Octodad, available for free from its website. This hilarious little title was created by a team of interactive media students at DePaul University in Chicago, and is the latest in a stream of successful indie games to come out of collegiate video game design programs. In fact, it's so successful that a sequel is in the works.
Glasses-free 3D is devouring the United States, one mobile device at a time. First, gamers experienced autostereoscopic play with the Nintendo 3DS, then smartphone users got the HTC EVO 3D, and now laptops users can enjoy glasses-free 3D technology with Toshiba's upcoming Qosmio F750, available this August.
This week's review roundup is a diverse lot. They really only have two things in common—their indie origins and puzzle elements. Otherwise, they come from France, Spain and the U.S., a few from unknown designers and one by the guy who inspired Minecraft.
Getting money to make a AAA game is hard. When anyone is lucky enough to get the funds they need, it usually comes from a giant game publishing company that wants the rights to the game, not to mention complete control. Those publishers have shareholders who demand a high return on their investment, so they avoid risk when choosing game projects to fund.
Hideo Kojima is one of the biggest names in Japanese game design. He's the man behind every Metal Gear game, each of which has been beautiful but divisive. He's an auteur, a rarity in AAA game design, managing business, design, and programming for Kojima Productions. Last week he made a rare public appearance at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, which contains the school's video game programs, and gave a 90-minute talk about his career, influences, and the specifics of his new Fox game design...
Stewart Butterfileld is one of the last great old-fashioned tech billionaires. He founded Flickr, and then sold the company to Yahoo! for a stupendous amount of money in 2005. Like Mark Cuban and others before him, he was left wondering what to do with the rest of his long and fabulously wealthy life. Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks and turned them from unabashed losers into beloved champions. Butterfield decided to try his hand at game design (something he had attempted with the ambitious ...
Three years ago, Double Fine productions held an in-house event called the Amnesia Fortnight. The company was split into four teams, each of which set out to spend two weeks developing an idea for a small game and present it to the other groups at the end of the duration. All of the ideas turned out to be winners, and founder/owner Tim Schafer secured publishing deals for all four games to be released on a combination of XBLA and PSN. In honor of the excellent Trenched becoming the third game...
Steam has been a game-changer in the PC indie game market over the last eight years, making smaller games available to millions of users at lower prices than ever before. And few times in those eight years have there been as much indie awesomeness on sale for as little money as this weekend.
Do you love video games? Would you devote your free time to creating your own game—one superior to the games you already have? Or at least one that has more Neil Patrick Harris jokes?
Pressing the button on a video game controller quickly is like running the 100 meter dash. Both require dedication and a precise exercise regime. There is also an odd quality about both in which the range between the very best and complete neophyte is tiny. Sprinter Usain Bolt holds the record in the 100 meter run at 9.58 seconds, only three seconds faster than I ran in freshmen high school track. And yet there are thousands of sprinters from a hundred years of Olympic competition in between ...
Yesterday, Electronic Arts had a nice sale on Steam for 40-60 percent off some of their Sims titles, which included The Sims 3 (along with its DLCs) and SimCity 4. I've never been a big Sims fan, especially with the slew of virtual people games in the last decade, so I didn't realize until now that Maxis had stopped making their SimCity games; They haven't released any city building Sim games since SimCity 4 eight years ago. There was SimCity Societies in 2007, but it was made by a different ...
As most of us know, men and women are (shocker alert) different. Not only are they different, but they view the world an entirely different way.
Water purifiers are already portable, but not as portable as this crazy invention. Created by Marcus Triest and Ryan Lynch, the Solar Bag can be worn like a shoulder bag and holds up to 2.5 gallons of water. In a feat of ingenuity, the bag is designed to use sunlight to purify the stored water, allowing you to filter drinking water on the go. The bag is made from two layers of polyethylene—a clear, high-clarity layer on the outside and a black layer on the inside. The top layer allows the max...
At GDC 2011 this past March, three of the world's best game designers participated in a contest called Game Design Challenge. Each presented their vision for a game that fit the prompt "Bigger than Jesus: games as religion" before an audience, with applause to determine the winner. Jenova Chen, John Romero, and Jason Rohrer all spoke, and Rohrer won in a landslide with his revolutionary game called Chain World.
Grand Theft Auto 3 was the biggest video game of the last decade, by far, introducing open-world adventure games to consoles, a genre that now rivals shooters and sports games for market dominance. A huge map, decentralized narrative, and myriad of interlocking quests and objectives that happen in a flexible order all became hallmarks of the "new" genre, along with the ability to shape the morality and reputation of your character. And most importantly, all of the quests and stories are compl...
Two new and radically different ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) have burst into the news in the last week, and illustrate the very best of an innovative phenomenon: the commercial tie-in ARG, and the public service ARG.
Jersey Shore's pickle-loving, drunken little ball of fun has captured the affection of many, as well as a fair share of haters. According to today's Wall Street Journal, Snooki and other Jersey Shore characters have surpassed Lady Gaga in popularity for Halloween costumes of 2010. Go Snook. (Not too surprising. For lots of ladies out there, the more revealing the costume, the better.)
No exaggeration in today's headline, design student Anna Schwamborn has actually designed a jewelry line made from the hair and cremated ashes of dead loved ones. Human hair sure makes a nice accent to the black bone china (note the word "bone" - human ashes are mixed in).
Uh-mazing...London based designer team Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz have created a dress embroidered with 24,000 LEDs.
Need help getting started on this week's WTFoto Challenge? Look no further! In this tutorial, I will teach you how to create simple chalk symbols and writing in Photoshop. So read through this post and try it out yourself—or I'll tell your cousin what you said when you were drunk that one time. Keep in mind that the steps are similar for other programs, such as GIMP.
I've been unreasonably excited about Dungeon Defenders (NOT DUNGEON DEFENDER!) for almost a year. Playing it at PAX did nothing to damper that enthusiasm. I had a chance this week to speak with co-founder/development director Jeremy Stieglitz and marketing diretor Philip Asher from Gainesville, Florida based developer Trendy Entertainment to find out a little more about the game, and how it came together.
Sometimes an iDevice is best used for idle, pointless fun. Today's segment of Making Art on Your iOS Deviceis a mixed bag of time-wasting cool effects and random, but useful art-making tools. Below, 10 apps for creating anything from erratic hand-shaken digital effects to your very own DIY Andy Warhol prints.
This tutorial shows a very common method used by many graphic designers in order to create a retro effect from an image using Photoshop. Create a retro effect in Photoshop.
Adobe Fireworks is a bitmap and vector graphics editor aimed at web designers. In this Fireworks 8 video tutorial you will learn how to combine path objects, create a vector path, and join paths from multiple layers. Make sure to hit "play tutorial" in the top left corner of the video to start the video. There is no sound, so you'll need to watch the pop-up directions. Combine path objects in Fireworks 8.
