The Hunger Game

Heres a game I made for the Oculus Rift with my colleagues at DAN.

http://thehungergame.com.au/

Cute Redhead

Mini-rant on music that I sent to someone in an email tonight.

“I believe that there are many ways to be creative within the tools that we use.
Even though the tools are the same, there are still many possible outcomes.
The creativity comes from within.
The individual absorbs and consume the world around them, and their sub conscious processes all this.
The sounds you hear in your head.
The things you see with you eyes.
The emotions you feel with your heart.
All that combined with the technical knowledge of music and how to use your instruments, your software, your hardware etc.
Sometimes you have to detach yourself from the world too. Get away from the mainstream.
Sometimes you get caught in the flow and it grabs you and you can’t get away.
Go for a holiday. Live in another country. Listen to music that is nothing like what you normally listen to.
Same as before. Combine existing elements to make something new.
That is the essence of creativity.”

This is the email as is. Stream of consciousness with no editing.

Don’t Fucking Procrastinate Wallpaper

Inspiration from: http://store.goodfuckingdesignadvice.com/product/don-t-fucking-procrastinate-mug-don-t-fucking-procrastinate-mug

Download the Photoshop file here: benxtan – Don’t Fucking Procrastinate.psd

Consumption

Consumption

Updated my list of things that I am currently consuming.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 3,300 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 6 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

All The Sonics

I was trying out Adobe Edge Animate the other night, and wanted to get a simple walk cycle animation happening.

Sonic sprite sheet

Eventually I decided it was too hard to get something something simple going, and that it wasn’t scalable.  I could get 1 sonic animating, but what if I wanted 100?

So, I decided to do it with with JavaScript instead. After a quick google, and some minor modifications to the code, I created this.

http://benxtan.com/test/sonic/

All The Sonics running across 6 screens.

Features:

• 100 Sonics running across the screen
• Each Sonic is running at a randomised speed and frame rate
• The speed is relative to the frame rate (faster speed = faster frame rate)
• Also added a MIDI of a song from Green Hill for good measure =)

A bit of black metal fun today.

Which one’s your favourite?

Font downloaded from:

• http://www.dafont.com/xxii-ultimate-black-metal.font

Background images downloaded from:

• http://www.wallpaperpimper.com/wallpaper/download-wallpaper-Winter_Forest-size-1152×864-id-145581.htm
• http://www.oinkfrog.com/2012/06/kaleidoscope-of-recent-3d-deviantart.html

2 musical works in progress

Here are 2 musical works in progress. One from last week and one from today.

DOWNLOAD: (2012-08Aug-18) Hard Reset

This one has a bit of a new wave and synthpop kinda feel to it. Have some lyrics for it, but will wait until I’ve finished the whole song before sharing that on the Interweb.

DOWNLOAD: (2012-08Aug-26) Soft Reset

This ones some kinda blues/jazzy piece. Was playing an iPhone game made by a friend called Pong Beats (http://www.pongbeats.com/) and remembered how much I love the sound of acoustic piano, so decided to pull put my M-Audio Axiom 25 and connect it to Ableton Live and make some music

I haven’t used it in a long time…and for some reason, the C# and G keys on both octaves don’t work anymore! After doing some googling, sounds like its a common problem. Someone’s solution was to turn it upside down and slap it. I tried it but it didn’t work. Well, I managed to make some music even without those 2 notes (4 keys all up), and I added a task to my TODO list to figure out whats wrong some other day. Hopefully its not a hardware problem!

Cup Face

Cup Face – 2011 – Sharpie on paper cup.