Illformed

The personal and professional website of Kieran Foster

Nanotube

Nanotube Screenshots

“Nanotube” is a wicked little flash game that my mate John put together. The game itself is fairly simple: You must rotate the outer ring of cells to catch the corresponding coloured particles which move outwards from the center of the screen. For every particle you catch your energy bar gradually turns green, while missed particles cause it to gradually turn red. Keep it in the green to score points, but go too far into the red and it’s game over.

Don’t let the simple mechanics fool you, though… this game is a tricky little bugger! It quickly goes from nice and casual to absolutely frantic, where one little mistake can lead to a huge, panicked chain reaction, shouting “oh shit! oh shit! oh shit!!”

Nanotube is released under Slakinov.com, which is a new project that John and I are working on in our spare time. We hope to build up a nice collection of games there in the future, focusing on stylish presentation, interesting gameplay mechanics and, most importantly, fun! We should have a proper site up there fairly soon-ish, so stay tuned…

Play Nanotube

http://www.slakinov.com/nanotube.html

Welcome

Welcome to the new Illformed.org website!

As you can see, quite a lot has changed. The site will no longer be functioning as a collective creative outlet for my friends and I, since most of the people involved (myself included) have either been inactive for a very long time, or are simply focusing mainly on other websites and time-consuming projects. As a result, the amount of content being generated by Illformed as a group was barely more than a trickle. After taking all of this into consideration, plus the fact that the site was hosted on a rather expensive dedicated server which was mainly going to waste, I could simply no longer justify the site’s existence. Time to chalk it up to experience and move on to something new!

This new, smaller site will serve as a home for all of my personal interests such as music production, programming, graphics, and photography, as well as being the home for any projects that I am working on in the future. I have decided to keep the Illformed name since I have always liked it, and since it has become quite recognisable due to my rather infamous Glitch VST plug-in.

Speaking of Glitch, I am going to be dedicating a lot more of my time to audio software development from this point onwards. After 9+ years in the web development industry I am definitely ready to try a new direction in life. Ultimately I would love to be able to make a modest living creating interesting plug-ins and other tools, so you can expect to see a few new things coming in the future, including some updates to Glitch, plus a mixture of fun freebies and reasonably-priced commercial products on offer.

In the meantime, please bear with me while I get comfortable with this new site and fill it up with content. There are a few things that I haven’t added yet, such as the full documentation for Glitch, but I hope to take care of it relatively soon.

Cheers!

Dubstep mixset by FuX

FuX

My good friend Sven, aka FuX, has released a sweet dubstep mixset. Over 50 minutes of deliciously heavy beats. Grab it for free right now and start tickling those subwoofers!

Byiieeeooooowww wub wub wub wub wub!


Flash Sketch Prototype

sketch

Inspired by Steve Mason’s awesome Flash sketch tool, I decided to have a go at creating my own. It’s just a very rough prototype at the moment but it’s already looking quite organic. I think it has potential if I ever find the time to continue working on it. I would like to include some basic layer support with multiple blending modes, different brush/medium types, etc.

Left mouse button to draw (colour is simply chosen at random for now).
Z key to undo to last brush stroke.
E key to erase the canvas.

Requires Flash player 8!



Continue reading… »

Renoise Nerds At Evoke 2007

Renoise users at Evoke demo party 2007

Me and some fellow Renoise nerds having fun at Evoke demo party 2007. From left to right: Antoine, Kaneel, me, Keith303, Gilli, Looza, Jürgen and Ptrance.

Photo credit: Keith303’s girlfriend.

Lost In Bass (GraLL Edit)

GraLL

An independent game developer got in touch with me to ask for permission to use my track “Lost in Bass” in his game “GraLL” - a 3D puzzler involving strange scientists, hazardous obstacles and a mysterious, spherical robot!

The track was slightly longer than the developer had in mind and was sounding a little rough since its original release in 2003, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to create a new and improved edit for 2007.

Check out the game and you’ll hear my track if you make it to the last level, or simply download the mp3 from the link below!


Download

Lost in Bass (GraLL Edit)
Length: 05m:29s / Filesize: 10.7MB


Glitch Demo Video

This is just a quick demo video I made to show off some of the features of my Glitch VST plug-in. I let a simple breakbeat sample play on loop while I go through and tweak various parameters in real time. It’s difficult to see all the details thanks to YouTube’s low res video, but hopefully you get the idea.

Cube Chaos

Cube Chaos

Simple test render created with Lightwave 3D.

Update: At the request of a friend I have re-rendered the image at 1920×1200, making it suitable for use as a desktop wallpaper.

Depth Of Field

Depth of field test

A quick test render while playing around with depth of field in Lightwave 3D.

1985 EP

dblue - 1985 EP

While digging through drawers full of old junk one day at my dad’s house, I found some cassette tapes filled with silly home recordings. One tape in particular contained recordings of my sister and I as young children; reading nursery rhymes, telling jokes, inventing bizarre radio stations and other ridiculous shows, plus a wide variety of other incredibly random sound bytes and noises. In other words, I had stumbled upon a sample goldmine!

“1985 EP” is a collection of strange, brooding, electronic rhythms that were inspired by the quirky, nostalgic sounds I sampled from that childhood cassette tape.

Enjoy!


Download

dblue - 1985 EP
Length: 22m:57s / Filesize: 31.1 MB