For those of you who have been playing the game Blocks, we’ve released a newer version of the demo. We have incorporated a lot of the feedback received from everyone and included 3 new levels. For a full rundown, check out the Darkwind Media Blog.

Thank you for playing!

This is an animated short up for an Oscar this year that’s done almost entirely with Corporate logos, with a bit of a weird Pulp Fiction-type flair.

Check it out.

Hey guys, if you missed it our article was in Sunday’s Democrat and Chronicle newspaper. We are really excited and have already received several contacts over it. It was on the front page of the business section with a huge picture of us standing there (the one from the last blog post) and nice big text. Really eye-catching.

So anyways, if you are online and want to give it a read you can find the whole article here.

Edit: By the way, there is a Joe DeJoia cameo in the article that is worth reading. I dare you to read his quote in your head and not hear it in his voice.

Vanishing Point from Bonsajo on Vimeo.

Some pretty sweet procedural animation right there

World Builder from BranitVFX on Vimeo.

Awesomeness. I would love to work in that kind of an environment.

This game looks exquisite. I may actually have to purchase this on Steam soon. They have single player and co-op modes. Pretty badass, and with a $30 price tag it’s pretty tempting.

Here’s some single player action:

Here’s some co-op action:

Augmented reality is a rapidly growing trend in the gaming / graphics industry and I love seeing people push the limits of the technology. I’ve posted once or twice before about some basic prototypes that are out there, but this is really cool.

ARhrrr is a prototype game from the Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and the Savannah College of Art and Design. The game requires a hand held device equipped with a new graphics processing unit called the Nvidia Tegra and a tabletop map.

Once you start the game, the buildings pop up on the screen and zombies start to flood out of them into the streets, terrorizing innocent civilians that you need to rescue. You point the camera on the device towards the zombies using the on-screen crosshair and tap anywhere on the screen to shoot. The game incorporates the use of real-world objects, skittles in this case, as game elements such as bombs.

I love seeing the AR games, but what I find the most interesting is what’s coming in the future. Augmenting reality to the point where we see a Tom Tom arrow through our contact lenses while we’re hiking in the woods, or being able to look at a building and get the contact information for the businesses inside based on GPS location. Yeah, it’s going to be real sweet.

Hey Juicers, how have you been? I haven’t been around much lately, I’ll be better I promise.

I wanted to let everyone know that you can finally get Luster installed on your Windows machine and start playing around with some demos. Head on over to the Luster Beta Sign-up page to get started. After you have signed up, we need to activate your account. Once that happens, you’ll receive an email with instructions and more details about the whole shabang.

There’s some basic tech demos available online right now, but we have some sweeter demos that will trickle out over the next week or two, including one of the music visualizers. You should definitely check out the Arthas Dance Animation, it’s pretty cool. It uses somewhat advanced lighting techniques, so if you have an older video card it may not look as great as it should. But that’s what this beta thing is all about, figuring out these little details, right?

I leave you with a video of the Arthas animation. Major props to Chris for making this happen.