Alex Hardy

Line Rider is a Flash game that I only discovered today for the first time. Shame on me for being so out of touch .

It was originally created by Boštjan Cadež, a Slovenian university student, in September 2006. Since its release it has gained cult status via players sharing videos of their tracks on YouTube and has been viewed over 16 million times!

The game itself is simple, but fiendishly addictive. You don’t control the sledger, you draw the track. Then let him go. That’s all. It might sound simple, but getting the little guy to do one jump without taking a spill is tricky.

Play it, then you’ll understand.

Variations on this theme for the Wii and Nintendo DS are in development.

I love finding these little stories. They remind me that the web is a unique place, where a good idea can reach the world.

Yugop.com is the online playground of acclaimed designer Yugo Nakamura.

With a combination of a slick style and head-melting mathematics, he’s created a collection of artworks in Flash that have been exhibited internationally in galleries as prestigious as the Design Museum in London and the Kunstlerhaus in Vienna.

He is one of the authors of New Masters of Flash by Friends of Ed.

I bought Okami for the PS2 last week, having eagerly awaited its release. This isn’t a review (I’ll save that until I’ve explored the game further), but I thought I’d post my thoughts on it.

It’s a terrible shame that Clover Studio has been dissolved by parent company Capcom. It seems their unusual games (which include Viewtiful Joe) haven’t managed to turn critical acclaim into commercial success.

Okami itself (via an almost boringly long introduction) tells the tale of a village cursed by the demon Orochi, a many-headed black serpent that lives outside the town in a cave. Every year the villagers were forced to sacrifice a young woman to the demon. This continued until a young man, with the help of a mysterious wolf, fought the demon to save the girl he loved. Together they banished the demon and a shrine was built to mark the site.

But, as the intro says, that is not the end of the tale…

A hundred years later, an unidentified someone removes the hero’s sword from the plynth. This act releases the demon once again. The world is now a blackened, lifeless wasteland. An appeal by the forest nymph Sakuya sees the sun goddess Amaterasu appear in the form of a white wolf.

I’ll put it plainly: Okami is the most beautiful game I have ever played. The artwork, which moves and flows like a combination of impressionist painting and Japanese calligraphy, is breathtaking and seems to get better with every moment you spend playing the game.

Innovative touches are in abundance, the main one being the brush. Through the discovery of techniques you can use it as a weapon, or to restore life. I’ve already used it to paint a bridge over a cliff and a star back into the night sky.

There are also genre formulaic gameplay elements. There’s a bit of pot smashing for money and Amaterasu’s little friend Issun is rather like Link’s companion Navi in Zelda: Ocarina of Time. As long as I don’t end up lighting torches and pushing blocks around I won’t complain too much.

Okami seems tremendously promising and may earn a place in my top 50.

I’d like you to have a look at Orisinal; a collection of some of the most beautifully made Flash games I have seen.

Most of the games have very simple play mechanics, relying on a few key controls and the mouse. The simplest games are usually the most enjoyable though and I’m certain that you’ll find at least one game that threatens your day’s work with the desire to see your name on its high score table.

Charmingly illustrated characters and clever use of blur effects give the graphics texture and depth of field that is uncommon in Flash games.

Some of my favourites: The Bottom of the Sea, Chicken Wings and Friends.

Admired web design studio Happy Cog have updated their website.

Home to author and web standards advocate Jeffrey Zeldman, as well as designers Jason Santa Maria, Greg Storey and Dan Cederholm, Happy Cog publish A List Apart, host events and somehow find the time to design websites for the likes of Amnesty International.

So a redesign of their own website is bound to cause a stir among the web design community, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Zeldman has a post describing the rationale for the design on his personal website. The crux of it is that it connects the diverse activities of the company by expressing them in a sentence and building the navigation upon that statement.

As usual, their design is simple and effective with a warm, friendly palette. I also note with interest that their blog is built on WordPress.

Have a look. While you’re at it, buy Zeldman’s book Designing with Web Standards. I’ve read the first edition, and it proved a solid starting point for learning XHTML/CSS based design.

I thought I’d kick off a new section. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m going to keep a record of things I find interesting or inspiring. It might be anything - a website, movie, videogame or something further afield like an interesting art or design book, an exhibition, a piece of architecture or something from the natural world (there are some pretty wild designs there!).

It’s a Friday and I’m feeling unwell, so I’ll make my first post a brief one. It’s a website from my home town.

It’s the Manchester City Galleries website by Manchester agency Reading Room.

The graphic design is clean and simple, not really much to write home about (or indeed post about), so why am I drawing attention to this site?

Go to your browser options, and increase the text size. Notice how, instead of the usual effect (the text getting larger and the page layout breaking), the whole layout enlarges - images and all. In some cases you observe some wrapping as elements get too large, but it works well for the most part.

For the web designers among us, they’ve done this by setting body {font-size:62.5%;} in CSS, which makes 1 em = 10 pixels. They then specify the dimensions of everything with ems. So the image of the front entrance is sized as {width:16em; height:15.2em;} - in effect 160px x 152px. So because ems are a measurement that scales when you enlarge the text everything grows proportionately.

This is great for people who have poor eyesight who habitually enlarge text, or perhaps just those on fancy high resolution screens.

Very clever indeed.