Early last year, I wrote a post here about a piece of digital art software that I thought was really neat. Pixel Composer was, and is, really neat, but after I wrote that post I didn’t use it again for months. That was no fault of the software. Pixel Composer is great. It just wasn’t something that I could fit into my regular workflow. I do a lot of 3D modeling and rigging and drawing and texture painting and creating shaders and materials. Almost none of that requires the use of a tool almost exclusively designed around pixel art.

Over the weekend I participated in the first Calgary Arcade Jam. Our local game developer association has been assembling a few arcade cabinets for years. To get them kick started, we held a jam so that there would be games to play on them when they went out into the world.

I have had a small home server running here for years. I never asked that much of it. It hosts some files, a handful of movies and shows, some backups, etc. It just sits in the basement, and spins up occasionally when I need it. Recently I decided to change that.

Best Games - Star Wars : Dark Forces Before Rogue One or Andor, every Star Wars fan knew that it was former Imperial officer turned rebel mercenary, Kyle Katarn, who stole the Death Star plans. Most of those fans probably even remember exactly where the plans were hidden. In fact, those fans had done it themselves.

In the last few weeks I fixed a few things in my game, added some animation, completely broke everything, patched it back together, and then added some control and organization code that will make everything else I have to do so much easier.

If you happen to be reading this where it lives on my website, you will probably notice that it all looks a little different. A little simpler. A few of the links and menus are missing. Welcome to the new home of whatever it is I’m doing here.

Sometime in the next couple of weeks, this site will probably experience some interruptions. It may even go offline for a bit. The time has come for the move. I have been hosting it in one place for a while, but I am finding that the small amount of convenience that I get from hosting where it is now, does not make up for the lack of flexibility and portability I could have if I hosted it either myself, or at a place like GitHub.

Best Games - Populous Populous is a game where your primary method of interaction is to raise and lower the level of the ground one small patch at a time. Understandably, that might not sound very compelling, but when you play Populous hours disappear in a snap.

Enjoy this test video!

Writing recently has been … slow. I think doing the ‘write a story every week for six weeks’ thing is great for getting a bunch of practice coming up with concepts. It’s even great for completing projects, since you pretty much have to complete them to submit them. It does burn you out on writing for a bit though.

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. ​