Hey Lucas, thanks a lot for the detailed feedback!

Yes, the iPad version is much easier than the pc one, but there are still some tricky videos. There are several reasons for this but the main one is an artistic reason:

I did not want to crop, accelerate, slow down or retouch in any way the source material. This is because it's much more interesting to me and it makes a lot more sense if it's truly a "found footage" game. It's about really creating movement between totally disconnected things. If I had strarted retouching things there would be no difference between that and if I directly made the videos myself to fit the purpose. Then you would be synchronizing videos that are meant to be synchronised and that would feel less surprising. One would think that the only way this effect could work it by having videos specificly created to fit it. I wanted to demonstrate that in cinematography movements are just movements and that the continuity effect can be achieved with anything.

So that reason limits me to a very small number of possibilities. Finding videos that fulfill the task without retouching them was very hard, and I know some of them are far from perfect examples.

Then I feel that is nice to have a variable/random difficulty, but I understand this can frustrate some people.

Even if you don't understand where the raccord points shoud be I hoped that the playback at the end of the chain would demonstrate that the effect workedt.

I must say that most of the design choices in this game were done with an artistic mind rather than a game-deeign mind, and I know that can hurt the "game" part of a game.

Hey, congrats con getting it featured on the indiegames blog!

Thanks!

@increpare: I know, this has been an impossible thing to balance. Everybody finds a certain video hard to synchronize but it´s never the same one. It´s a very subjective thing, it depends on everyone´s perception, there´s no truly "correct" answer, just the answer that felt the more correct to me.

Have you had a look to the tutorial video? Wasn´t it helpful enough? After a bit of practice you´ll understang how each video works and it will feel much easier, it just takes a while as it´s such an unusual way of thinking.

Hi everybody,

Today my iPad game "Loop Raccord" was released: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/loop-raccord/id464293817?l=es&ls=1&mt=8




It´s a video-editing game in which you have to synchronize a chain of videos in order to create an illusion of continuous movement between them.

The trailer video gives a better idea of what it´s like:
http://vimeo.com/troshinsky/loopraccord

As I come from a cinema background with no gamemaking or programming skills this was an attempt to apply what I learnt in one field to another. The idea was to make a game that uses cinematographic language as gameplay.

Originally this was a freeware pc game I did in one week for the Experimenta Gameplay Project´s "Neverending" theme. It was after it got to be a finalist for the Nuovo award in the Independent Games Festival that I decided to refine and expand the experience. It is at this moment an IndieCade finalist too.

You can still download the original version, although I warn that it feels much clumsier and unintuitive, and many new features are not present: http://pluralgames.blogspot.com/2010/09/loop-raccord.html


Hope you like it!

This is actually quite clever.

It dosen´t feel lika a sport game at first, but it definitely does after a while. I feels like training in a gym. There are some nice surprises and variations and it stupidly addictive.

The visual and sound design is really nice.

Conglaturations!

Hello guys,

"Folderworld" is my latest experiment. I call this "a multimedia sandbox exploration game with user created content played through Dropbox".

Basically "Folderworld" presents a world under a system of folders where you can enter inside any object and see what it contains or what it´s made of. You can freely modify the world, explore, look for hidden tresures and craft your own treasures and hide them for other players to find. The world is pretty small right now, more a sketch of a world than a world really, ideally you should be able to explore any object down to it´s atomic composition.

The game is played through the dropbox website.
If you feel interested please join.

More info here:

http://pluralgames.blogspot.com/2011/05/folderworld.html

Cheers!

Just made a gameplay video to show that it is actually possible to play this game properly:

Great stuff man!
Very clever.

By the visual style and music it reminds me of Cactus's Gamma4 game. In a good way.

Hi everybody!

Just finished an entry for this month's Experimental Gameplay Project challenge, under the theme "cheap clone".

"Motion Columns" is a remake of the classic game "Columns" in which instead of matching three diamonds with the same color you have to match three diamons with the same movement pattern.



At first sight, with the screen filled with objects of different colors moving in different patterns, the game seems unplayable. It takes some effort and concentration but it is fairly playable once you manage to forget about forms and colors and focus exclusively in the motion. An advice: the way the human eye works, the center of the retina percieves the forms and the contour percieves the motion. It is much easier to find groups of diamonds that move the same way when not looking directly at them.

"Motion Columns" is my fifth game under my "Recycling Games" project, which consists in using preexisting audiovisual material as source for gamemaking. This time, to remind the decorative style of the original Columns, the game was entirely done from classic clipart engravings.

The game is here:

http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/puzzle/motion-columns/5008/

2,8 mb
Windows.


Enjoy!

"delete" key works too!

<div style="padding: 5px; padding-bottom: 0; float: left"><img src="http://www.troshinsky.com/LBFsshotTIG.jpg" width="300" height="200" /><p style="margin-top: 0"><a href="http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=17749.0">Low Bitrate Fighters</a>, by Nicolai Troshinsky</p>
</div>

Finished!

First playable version available:

http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/low-bitrate-fighters/files/low-bitrate-fighters/download/4539/6057/

I am going to add more videos so you don´t have the same ones constantly looping, although I´m not sure if I´ll be able to do that before the deadline, as the encoding process is rather long. This might end up being the competition version... we´ll see.

Been doing some tests mixing ffdshow motion compensation, quicktime, and cinepak compression and it´s not bad.

Although I would prefer colours going mad instead of going to grayscale. Have not found a way for this other than recompressing a houndred times with cinepak, which is way too long and tedious.

If only I could make the game open a video which contains just the vector movement information and apply it over the last frame of the last video in real time...

Thanks!

Very, very interesting...

Have to look into mpeg2 compression then. I wish they shared that hacked codec on spench.net, it´s exactly what I would need.

The thing is that right now, what I can achieve is to compress each individual video. Ideally, what could be really awesome, is that as different video clips appear one after another they would keep the last frame from the last video and apply the motion compensation of the current one. Unfortunately this is too far away from my skills, I would need a crazy programmer...

Will get back into compression testing see what I can find.

EDIT:

Aha! Found a tutorial:

Yeah, that last artifact you talk about is defenitely the best one, but I have no idea how to achieve that. There is this music video that explores that in very interesting ways:





I also saw some experimental short film that played with broken immages. They burned the video on a cd, then scratched the cd, then captured the broken video and repeated the process several times. It was beautiful.

I have no programming skills (I use Multimedia Fusion 2), so it´s impossible for me to write custom shaders. What I was planning is to reencode each video clip several times and save them as .mov files. Then make the game access the files. It´s not difficult, just long.

I will have a look to that gif compression too, could be interesting.

EDIT:

Just found this one:





Really beautiful.

Hi,

I´m joining the competition with a two player fighting game made out of videos of real street fights found around the net. It´s called "Low Bitrate Fighters".



Each fighter´s video takes one half of the screen. As fighters get physically destroyed, the video quality gets digitally destroyed: with every hit taken the video quality lowers, so the quality of the video serves as life counter.

Here some new tests using ffdshow codec and quicktime graphic compression:



I´ll be using this one.

Gameplay will be as stupid and as skillful as a street fight can get: Players only have one attack button. To avoid the opponent´s hit all you can do is to hit back within half a second. The first who stops punching will get hit.

Will test this and maybe add some more rules, but the point is not really about making it fun to play. I will also experiment with overlaying videos, not sure how it will look like but I´ll keep it really simple.

Guess I will spend most of the time compressing video over and over. ¿Anybody has an idea of a practical way for doing this? ¿Anybody knows a codec that excels in detroying the immage?

EDIT:

Added some randomness, so when both players are desperately trying to hit each other there are some chances that someone will get hit. Also, if both players keep fighting without hitting each other they will be separated.

FINISHED:

-Added some more videos, would have loved to put even more, but it's too much work and the game is getting really big already.
-Inversed the control scheme: left player punches with the "0" numpad key, right player punches with the left "control" key. This way players have to physically invade each other's space.
-Fighters heal if they stop to catch their breath for some seconds.

I think the idea is funnier than the game, but I'm still happy with the experiment.

Download here:

http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/arcade/low-bitrate-fighters/4539/

Windows, 127.Mb

Hi,

I would like to make an improved version of my game "Shoot-Em-Art" and turn it into a flash game.



The game is really simple and has prooved to be fun, but it´s too heavy due to the amount of sprites and sound. My idea, apart form slightly improving the gameplay and fitting it into a browser size, is to redraw everything in flash (or use a mix of bitmaps and vector graphics) and to split the music into a series of loops to make it smaller. I have no flash programming skills so I would like to know if there would be somebody interested in taking care of this.

There´s no inmidiate money involved but my idea is to submit this to FlashGameLicence and see what happens. I have never done this before but I´m really curious to see how it turns out and it feels to me that this game could easily fit into a flash portal. In case the game got sold I would go 50/50 with the developer, whatever we got paid.

You can check out the original game here:
http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/shooter/shoot-em-art/4168/

If interested, write me to:

troshinsky at terra.es

Hi there,

I've just finished "Raccord Sniper", a memory-furniture-shooting game entirely made of immages taken from the IKEA catalogue.



It is my third "Recycling Game", a project consisting in using preexistant audiovisual material as source for game-making.


There's a trailer here:





Download the game at:

http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/other/raccord-sniper/4342/

More info at:

http://pluralgames.blogspot.com/2011/01/en-lenguaje-cinematografico-existen.html



Hope you like it!

Hi there,

I´ve just finished an entry for this month´s Experimental Gameplay Project´s challenge, under the theme "Draw":

Shoot-Em-Art



A creative shooter, as opposed to the destructive nature of the genre.
Hope you like it!

PC, 15mb
Download here: http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/shooter/shoot-em-art/4168/

http://pluralgames.blogspot.com/