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Indie Royale goes back to school with new seven-game bundle
The latest Indie Royale game bundle is serving up seven games at a low, pay-more-than-the-minimum price for Steam and Desura. The Back to School Bundle includes Ronimo Games' Swords & Soldiers, along with the game's Super Saucy Sausage Fest DLC.The bundle also includes Lunar Flight by Shovsoft, Bunny Must Die: Chelsea and the 7 Devils, Qlione and Flying Red Barrel by Rockin' Android, rhythm-RPG game Sequence from Iridium Studios, and the game and original soundtrack for Cute Things Dying Violenty from ApathyWorks. Those that spend over $8 on the bundle will also receive an 18-track chiptune album, BIAS. The Back to School Bundle will be available over the course of this next week.
Max Planck Institute sequences genome of Siberian girl from 80,000 years ago, smashes DNA barriers
We've known little of the genetic sequences of our precursors, despite having found many examples of their remains: the requirement for two strands in traditional DNA sequencing isn't much help when we're usually thankful to get just one. The Max Planck Institute has devised a new, single-strand technique that may very well fill in the complete picture. Binding specific molecules to a strand, so enzymes can copy the sequence, has let researchers make at least one pass over 99.9 percent of the genome of a Siberian girl from roughly 80,000 years ago -- giving science the most complete genetic picture of any human ancestor to date, all from the one bone you see above. The gene map tells us that the brown-skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired girl was part of a splinter population known as the Denisovans that sat in between Neanderthals and ourselves, having forked the family tree hundreds of thousands of years before today. It also shows that there's a small trace of Denisovans and their Neanderthal roots in modern East Asia, which we would never have known just by staring at fossils. Future discoveries could take years to leave an impact, but MPI may have just opened the floodgates of knowledge for our collective history.
Amazon stores 1,700 human genomes in the cloud
Not content with speeding up web browsing and hosting federal data, Amazon Web Services are now helping in the fight against disease. Bezos' crew is donating a chunk of free cloud storage to the 1000 Genomes project, which aims to make it easier for scientists to search for genetic variations linked to diseases. These gene-hunters can also use Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute service to analyze data and discover patterns, although those functions won't come gratis. The DNA sequences of 1,700 mostly anonymous Homo sapiens from around the world have already been logged, but the project has to upload another 1,000 samples before it meets statistical requirements. If it ever needs fresh volunteers, perhaps a free USB gene sequencer and a Prime subscription might do the trick?
Rhythm RPG Sequence now available on Steam
The Xbox Live Indie Game Sequence, which recently took home third place in Microsoft's Dream Build Play competition, is now available on Steam. In case you've missed our previous coverage, Sequence offers a unique take role-playing games, replacing traditional combat with rhythm game mechanics. Basically, imagine tapping along to a slammin' beat, except you're not earning points, you're slaying monsters. Sequence is currently available for $4.50, 10 percent off the usual price.
Congratulations to the 2011 Dream Build Play winners!
Swing Swing Submarine, creator of adorable puzzle-platformer Blocks That Matter, is the grand-prize winner of the 2011 Microsoft Dream Build Play competition, earning $40,000 and the opportunity for an XBLA publishing contract. In Blocks that Matter, you play as a Tetrobot, a tiny mining machine, to drill blocks of different minerals, which are stored and later reused to help Tetrobot find his kidnapped creators. Blocks That Matter is available now on Steam and XBLIG. Congrats to grand-prize champion Blocks that Matter and the following Dream Build Play winners: First Prize ($20,000): Solar 2 Second Prize ($10,000): TIC: Part 1 Third Prize ($5,000): Sequence Honorable Mention (Production Quality): Alien Jelly Honorable Mention (Innovation): The Bridge Honorable Mention (Fun Factor): Ninja Crash
XBLIG creators express disappointment with low sales
Xbox Live Indie Games might allow creative independence, but they aren't quite the path to financial independence just yet. As one piece of anecdata about the relative success of an XBLIG launch, Sequence creator (and ex-DS Fanboy writer!) Jason Wishnov described his experience to Ars Technica. Following a positive press reception, Sequence sold around 2,000 copies, a result Wishnov categorized as "a bit of a flop." He's looking at PC and mobile platforms for future projects; "It's not financially viable to do a larger-scale project and [not] expect with any certainty to make some money," he said. Zeboyd's Robert Boyd told Ars that his games, Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World, sold around 50,000 and 16,000 copies each respectively, making them relative hits for XBLIG. "I think our games could sell a lot better than they did with a better platform and more visibility," Boyd said. He's testing that theory with a Steam release of both on July 13. The bundle will cost $3.
Bronze makes your music collection sound downright lazy
No matter how large your record collection is, there'll always be days when you're sick and tired of everything you own. There are some pretty easy fixes to this, of course -- streaming music services, internet radio, and even the old fashioned terrestrial variety, but none attack the problem quite as directly as Bronze. The app was co-created by Golden Silvers' front man, Gwilym Gold, in part as a clever way to promote his new track, "Flesh Freeze," a hushed, Robert Wyatt-esque number, which just so happens to be the only song that it's compatible with at present. Bronze combats musical stagnation by altering the music itself, assuring that no two listens of a song are ever quite the same, running an algorithm that jumbles the sequence and presence of elements including the instruments and vocals. The changes are generally fairly subtle from play to play, taking a few listens to really pick up on what's unfolding. At present, it's available as a download for the Mac, with Windows and mobile versions to follow. It's free for now, but that, like the song, should change soon enough.
Rhythm/RPG hybrid Sequence out now on Xbox Live Indie Games
Iridium Studios' unique role-playing rhythm title Sequence has finally arrived on Xbox Live Indie Games. For the uninitiated, Sequence sees players conducting battle using a DDR-esque four direction input set to the rhythm of tracks from Michael Wade Hamilton and YouTube sensation Ronald Jenkees. On the RPG side, there's a ton of character customization, item crafting, pithy dialogue and also magic and stuff. The game's available now through the Xbox Live Indie Games storefront for 240 Microsoft Points ($3). If you're still confused on how this Frankensteinian genre-bender works, check out a launch trailer after the jump!
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Sequence
Being a giant, beloved video game site has its downsides. For example, we sometimes neglect to give independent developers our coverage love (or loverage, if you will) as we get caught up in AAA, AAAA or the rare quintuple-A titles. To remedy that, we're giving indies the chance to create their own loverage and sell you, the fans, on their studios and products. This week we talk with former DS Fanboy blogger and Iridium Studios head Jason Wishnov, about his rhythm RPG Sequence. How did you or your company get started? This is a boring question. I am going to replace your questions with interesting questions instead. What? But that's not how- Hello, Jason! You are handsome and talented. Can you please explain the trailer to me? Of course, Justin! The trailer shows off some of the core gameplay of Sequence, which is a fusion of RPG and rhythm mechanics. You see three streams of notes falling down from the top of the screen; each corresponds to a different action. You can rotate between them freely, but you can hit only one stream at a time. The stream in red is where you play defense; if you hit a note, no damage is done, but if you miss, you lose some HP. The stream in green is where you cast spells (found at the bottom of the screen, in the Spell Ring); you need to hit every note of a spell for it to actually activate. There are damage spells, healing spells, barriers, and so forth. And finally, the stream in blue is where you regain mana to cast more spells.
Swarm Light is an $180k LED chandelier controlled by an iPhone
This thing you see in the video on the next page (and in the picture above) is called the "Swarm Light." It's a series of little LEDs hung in sequence along three clusters of grids, lit up in order by a computer to display simulated collective movement, like a swarm of bees. It's very interesting, both as a display for a programmed algorithm, and just as an art project. All together, the display costs $180,000 -- no small chunk of change. If you do watch the video, you can see that the whole thing is run by an iPhone. rAndom International created their own internal app for Apple's device to run their various installations, and the iPhone app can dim the lights, adjust them to ambient light conditions and switch through the various modes. Just another awesome use of the iPhone.
iPhone-controlled 3D display, via ping pong balls and air pumps
I'm not quite 100% sure what this is -- it's supposed to be a "floating forecaster," some sort of 3D display for weather information, but to me it looks more like 30 air guns with ping pong balls sitting in them. I don't really see how the "weather" part of the display works, but what's really cool is that the whole thing is controlled by an iPhone. It looks like you touch whichever part of the grid you want to raise or lower, and then move your thumb up or down to set the ball at a certain level. With a little more software work, there's probably a lot more that could be done here, just creating patterns by swiping across the screen, or even running a game like Pong as the balls raise and lower across the grid in sequence. But as an art installation, it's pretty neat as is. Check out the full video after the break. Thanks, William!
