If you have read many of these posts, you know that this place has always been about video game ephemera, from actual development talk to musings on old titles. More recently these posts have also been about fiction writing and everything that goes along with it. Well that ends today.

The 90’s era arcade game that I have been working on for some time is finally starting to gel. The shaders that were very difficult to get right are nearly perfect. The pixel alignment script that took a while is now rock solid. The scale and angle of objects that didn’t want to comfortably fit under an orthographic camera now seem to work properly. One of the last things I needed to nail down was how to consistently create textures that look and feel like sprite and tile pixel art. In common fashion, I’m not creating them in the traditional way. People have been creating pixel art since the late 70s. Images that can be moved around a screen on discrete pixel unit at a time. That usually meant that they would draw the image out on graph paper, highlight specific colors if that was a capability of the hardware they were using, and then enter that ‘map’ into their game as code. Or, if they were an artist and not a programmer, they would hand that sheet over to someone else to punch into the computer. That went on for quite a long time, well into the late 80’s. Eventually computer aided art tools were developed that allowed artists to handle the art side independently. They would create the graphics and hand the finished file over to whoever was tasked with squeezing it into the game. A much cleaner workflow, but creating pixel art typically meant creating art a pixel at a time. Like a slightly less cumbersome light-bright. Gradually we got to the point where pressure sensitive tablets and screens using extremely sensitive electronic pens can pair with ridiculously sophisticated art software allow an artist to draw and paint as though they were using traditional media. It’s actually sort of amazing. I’m mostly using vector tools. Vectors drawing is like using mathematically defined shapes and regions to create art as opposed to scratching a mark onto a surface. The mark is easy to make, but it’s mostly static. It stays how and where you put it. That can be very useful. Sometimes you just want to make a mark in a specific place in a specific color. But sometimes, you want to make a box, and then have that box remain scalable, rotateable, and variable forever. When I create using vector tools, I am defining the parameters of the image, parameters that I can change at almost any time. Creating pixel art with vectors lets you get away with a lot of strange things. Tiling and palette swaps are trivial. Creating variations on a single tile is not only easy, but kind of leans into how these vector packages work. It’s playing to their strengths. I’m sure that I’m not the first person to do this. There are probably countless artists currently using this workflow for pixel art, but I haven’t really seen it out there in the wild. Anyway, here, enjoy some parametrically created pixel art.

Best Games - PaRappa the Rapper Hit buttons in time with the music. That’s the pitch. That’s PaRappa. It shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t be fun. For a time, rhythm games were the biggest thing in the world. Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and on and on. They still exist, of course. No real arcade would be complete without some sort of dance based rhythm game at this point. They aren’t as prominent as they once were, but it’s almost difficult to imagine the world before rhythm games. Back when the most rhythm adjacent game you could find was Simon.

Work continues slowly, but slowly, on my 2D pixel art game that is neither 2D nor pixel art. I redesigned and rebuilt the player character model and started the process of rigging it for animation.

I know it’s a cliche line to say that there is always more than one way to accomplish anything. I think that might be especially true for computer graphics. Of course, there are as many paths and processes to creating something like a painting as there are people who paint them, but you would think that with a system as rigid and, literally binary, as a computer, that there would be some processes that can only be done in one way. I have a recent example. I am trying to achieve an effect, something sort of like feathers or the little strips of paper dangling in layers from a pinata. Over the course of a few hours I discovered about a dozen ways to do that. Some of them are existing, even old by computer graphics standards, techniques. Some of them are combinations of strategies. A couple I came up with and for all I know they are completely novel. Some of them are purely geometry based. Just manipulation of triangles. Some of them are combinations of geometry and shader programs written to run extremely quickly on a computer’s GPU. A couple are purely image based, using layers of textures. The best ones for my purposes are probably combinations of all of these. Not one of them is the wrong or right choice. They all have their tradeoffs. I have thought many times over the years of getting a job teaching 3D modelling or animation. I have even applied a few times. I was once offered a job almost on the spot to teach a 3D course, but I turned it down. I didn’t think the school’s curriculum really aligned with the way I think digital art should be taught. There is not just one way to create anything, and there is not just one way to teach it. I think that might be my problem. I have been doing computer graphics a long time, and I can see so many potential paths. Trying to tell someone new to it that there is a right way to do anything, or that they should try to do things the way that I do them just seems so wrong. Wrong and possibly harmful. People should work the way that works for them. But that also means that you need to try a bit of everything, be a generalist, before you know what does and doesn’t work for you. Should a person new to, say, 3D modelling start by sculpting, hard low polygon modelling one vertex at a time, work orthographic or in perspective? I don’t know. I have a lot of tools in my arsenal at this point, but mostly, I know that I don’t know everything. I don’t have that self assured bravado that someone might need to walk into a classroom and declare that they know the path to getting you from zero to 3D artist in a few months. I know too much to think that I know that much. ​

Best Games - The Irritating Maze The Irritating Maze is not a complex game. It is not a game that defines or extends a genre. You will not find a compelling narrative or ingenious mechanics here. The Irritating Maze is simple. But it’s the right kind of simple.

Today I submitted the last of my ‘one story a week for six weeks’ stories. I’m gonna take a little break from writing (like a couple days… not like a break break) so I think this is all the words I have left in me this week.

I only have one more story to write for the ‘write one short story every weekend jam type thing’ that I have been doing. I will be glad to be done, since it is slightly stressful coming up with something new every weekend and then having a bunch of strangers judge it and pick it apart. On the other hand, it is pretty fun to push yourself and just see what you are capable of coming up with. And maybe it’s even a little fun to have a bunch of strangers pick apart your work, while you pick apart theirs. The hope is That in the end any story that comes out of this process will be that much better. You have passed that first draft, first read hurdle, and you can really try to send it.

Quite a few months ago, I bought the full Affinity suite of products. Before you ask, of course they were on sale. I have used Affinity Designer for a few years now, but up until recently, I haven’t had much reason to use Affinity Photo. I use Krita for most of my painting and image editing, and I still like it, but recently I have been working on my IPad more and more often. Drawing and painting directly on the screen has its advantages. Since Serif offered a single licence for Windows, Mac, and IOS, doing some image editing and painting in Affinity Photo was sort of a no-brainer.

Best Games - Money Puzzle Exchanger / Money Idol Exchanger If you’re like me, you think about Magical Drop 3 more than a person really should. Almost immediately after thinking about Magical Drop 3, you think of Money Puzzle Exchanger. It turns out, Face, the developer of Money Puzzle Exchanger, might be like me.

Every once in a while, I come across a game that I just don’t get. I can’t understand why other people enjoy it. This is very much a ‘not for me’ thing. I mean, go enjoy whatever games you like, I’m not going to tell you no, or tell you that you are wrong for liking it.

Last year I took part in a sort of challenge. Every weekend for five weekends write one story under 750 words. By the end of the challenge you end up with five stories (or six if you take part in the warmup round).

Best Games - Asteroids There is nothing quite like a game that lets you do battle with mans oldest foe. Rocks. Big rocks, little rocks, medium sized rocks that split into two smaller rocks. Rocks and void. The way it started. The way it was always going to end.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!