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Topics - tocky
Pages: [1] 2

1
http://goblinwars.tumblr.com/post/110973727397/goblinwars-goblinwars-goblinwars-wreckmyshit

            what the fuck? superman kills joker? what a fool weve been

            as you can see this is not a new meme if we map the dudes from watchmen to these vanilla dc nerds

            if they allow this to happen they admit that moore was right all along

        as well as this, they admit that they are the pale shadows of the truth, and that WATCHMEN is true, reminder that they, DC AND MARVEL, still lord the shared trade mark over super heroes. NO NET NEUTRALITY FOR THE RICH.

    AS WELL, AS THIS, JOKER DESERVES DEATH FOR ALL THAT HE HAS DONE. HE HAS SINNED AND HE WILL NOT REPENT

SO HERE, WHILE THEY GIVE US A STORY WE DESERVE, THEY STEAL FROM THE POOR (POOR OLD MOORE) AND THEY STEAL FROM ALL OF US (ANYONE WHO WOULD MAKE A SUPER HERO BUT WHO CAN NOT.) REMINDER THAT THERE IS BIG MONEY IN THIS

so yeah: they are robbing MOORE and he's not even in spinning his grave yet

i propose a new thread, this thread, to discuss this problem.

( hi im tocky and i'm a huge comics nerd. i've read watchmen, have you? we should all have done by now. i will consider you to have not read the thread if you have not even seen the watchmen movie. )

alright, all of the heroes in this classic triad represent important symbols, both to batman and to moore, and by extension, to rorschach. all three of these fine men: batman, the joker, superman. all three are rorschach because all three are batman.

anonymization (exporting) is a solved problem in compyting. if you can't get access to the canon guys you can change them just enough that they are not canon - and then write whatever stories you like.

moore has been allowed to write for batman: he wrote the killing joke. but they also spirited him over to DARK HORSE to live with GAIMAN and MIGNOLA, and there we can see he wrote the true story of BATMAN.

RORSCHACH is THE QUESTION. NITEOWL is BLUE BEETLE. MANHATTAN is SUPERMAN. all six of them are BATMAN.

SO I DONT KNOW IF THEY PAID MOORE FOR THIS NEW ARC, BUT:

1) THE JOKER WILL BE BACK
2) ALL OF THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE
3) THE JOKER DESERVES DEATH BUT WILL NOT FIND IT

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN


2
General Discussion / CVLT OF TIAMAT; the seven sermons of the serpent
« on: February 09, 2015, 09:14:39 pm »
okey, the first time i did this thread crow shut it down before it started, BUT I AM AGLEEFUL CULTIST OF TIAMAT AND WILL NOT BE STOPPED

i have permission from ptoing to make this thread, provided it relates back to pixel art and is not unkind to the persons i will discuss.

" No spamming new threads please. We want to keep this nice. " ptoing. and so it will bedone!

------------------------------

the new alien game is hot as fuck but im too afraid to play her beceause she is scary

--

so why you should let me write about the cults of teh old gods:

helm is a cleric of HASTUR, the king in yellow. Hastur,  who is extinction of a different sort than Tiamat: www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/20143.htm
the yellow king in all his glory. a meditation on Hastur, a meditation on meditations. its important to note that helm has decided to use the c64 to depict the yellow king, a palette that doesnt even really have much in the way of yellows. why? because helm can manufacture yellow.

ptoing is a cleric of demogorgon, and one of his monkey heds is helm the other is ilkke. ILKKE BEING A CLERIC OF JU, JUBILETH, THE EYE, THE NEGABUDDHA. so we can see that he is also hastur of a different sort. the c64 is hastur's strongest machine. when ptoing draws meditations on the robot he draws metitations on the flesh, hastur is the face hidden in the map which must not be seen, he is the face in the flesh, in the wood, in the metal, in the stone. but ptoing is funny where as helm is grim. ptoing knows jokes and what they're for, helm only knows PRAXIS, when helm makes a joke it is frightening. this is because he is not german but greek

---

anyway obviously i shouldnt put this in the off topic thread, i should start a thread for it. i did this but crow shut it down before it started. crow is ziz, or odin, or some such. he is a god of birds, this is plain. but he does not allow us to fly

--

im not gonna start the thread again without some mods permission, it doesnt have to be on wayofthepixel but i will write it somewhere if not here. hastur loves meat angels, he is himself a fallen angel

-- i do not wish to insult you doods, i wish to venerate you

-----------------

ok i think i have intelleged your message ptiont though you speak in riddles

basically i need a CVLT of TIAMAT thread for this. it can extend the why we should listen to tocky, but i made with that thread and i need a new one to say what i wish to say. iff i am not allowed new threads i will post in the off-topic thread - the problem is i might make a new thread everyday because i am a tiamat cultist. i understand this. my plan is to not do this. not all threads should be tocky

i will relate it back to pixel art, the way of the pixel, more often. i will talk about the secret techniques

bruce lee also knows hastur but he is a fighter and not a cleric. in a way he is a mad monk, like the scribe who writes the necronomicon

anyway i havent read the whole thread, just the most recent posts. it is foolish to ask me to do all this. it is right that it should be in the old off-topic thread and not the new one

3
General Discussion / why should we listen to tocky
« on: February 08, 2015, 09:17:56 pm »
i didnt start this thread exactly, ptoing split it from this other thread: http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=17784.0 )

edit:
two conversations with my friend clay
http://evilbaboons.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/clay.html
http://evilbaboons.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/clay-again.html

(im gonna double post here, even though i ve been told not to,  because it matters to me the difference between two parts of the same text and two different texts. my prose is meandering and noone will read this post if it just continues the previous one. different idea, different url. it has been 8 hours since that last post and noone has replied. this tocky is a different person than the tocky who wrote that other post -for instance i went to a friends place and played d&d since then - and we should appreciate my right to be a different tocky sometimes so long as it doesnt get to the point where all posts are tocky. tocky is an ACCELERATIONIST and a THREAD NECROMANCER and a HERETIC SJW-BUT-FOR-COLOR )

i tell you i am not a warrior: i am a rogue and a wizard and a cleric. i support social justice wizards and social justice rogues. i do not wish to fight.

(i hate killing spiders but i'll kill a mosquito. and i'll kill a spider if it comes after me. most spiders are soft-bodies really and not hard-bodies as we are told)

so yeah: color spaces hard to understand, color schemes not. because we choose our own color schemes but color spaces have to be totally defined - we're talking, we have chosen to talk, preferably about selective color spaces like the DAWNBRINGER PALETTE and not ambiguos ones, like the RGB space - schemes for specific purposes, spaces for all-purposes. we get these colors by dithering , a way of cheating to interpolate dissenting symbols into one message. we can do this with pixels and we can do it with text.

(i tell you: this pixel board has too much moderation because it is moderated in a pixel way - tigs too, being moderated in a game way. accept that this is a different post, a different idea. tigs and pixelation are the same, more the same than ever. pixelation should be grey and orange and not blue and white like tigs is - because im crazy and if it looks the same it is the same )

why dawnbringer though and not some other pixel artist? each image has its own palette, some selection smaller than the total RGB space.

so like: why use a flat lerp funtion and not a meandering one that goes into weird colors we would not usually consider part of the ramp? why not use some weird cubic curve or whatever, an n-cubic curve, instead of a flat lerp between the two most-distant colors on our ramp?

(pixels being ordered sets of color, forums being ordered sets of text. words are pixels too. two different-color pixels being differently-ordered than a different thing than one big fat pixel - the thing is CONTRAST. we are living in an environment of low contrast. )

HELM and CURE and DAWNBRINGER have even shown us that we should do this in analysis of their own OLD GODS such as the CHAOS ENGINE.

i tell you the dawnbringer pallete is too C64, too grey (and thus too dull and neutral) and too naturalistic for the purposes of most games i would want to make. when arne tells us we dont need purple very much because there is not much purple in nature, he is wrong, because we are not describing the natue of our own planet but the nature of ARCADE GAMES, which do use lots of purple. we want a palette that UNDERSTANDS THE SYMBOLIC MEANING OF THE COLOR PURPLE, like why this color? is it for wine and bruises and omens and dark magicks? yes and no. they can be any color.

this is ooze: the fabled color that rickwell the slimeomancer tells us of though he does not know it, he ventures to the kingdom of the clouds to seek it

so what's your fav color? it matters not for one second, but go with me for a second.

you know how the orange box in the valve editor is orange? i also use orange for the same purpose:

like, you open a new processing sketch and it asks you: what single color should the background be? and this is a false question because you can make it a gradient, you can make it change over time. we are tied to the no-time because we post static images here. but all processing sketches dream to be something more than just one color repeated over time.

the color i choose is TOCKY ORANGE, which is 200,100,0. why? multiples of 100 are easy to remember. 200,100,0 is a good color for this purpose: i dont have to name it in my code because i can simply look at the number and go, oh, that's my orange. but here im still treating color as a function of RED and BLUE, but we need not do this. in the HUE spaces we are told that color is a wheel, than no primary color are more primary than any others.

( what color is 100,200,0 then? i do not know because i havent looked it up and i havent remembered it. this is the ANTI-TOCKY-GREENRED and who will advocate for that color? not tocky: and i ask you what is your favourite color but do not tell me dawnbringer ever again )

so: TOCKY ORANGE. it's not neutral or naturalistic or grey. it's bright. it stands out against most other colors. it is HIGH CONTRAST.

an under-examined premise of color schemes is that they should be LOW CONTRAST: for any two colors that we cannot ramp between, we should add some color that lets us ramp between them.

why do this? will it muddy our colors? yes it will. will it make us tend towards the grey, of course it will. sometimes we are allowed WARM GREYS and COOL GREYS but this does not solve the problem enough. we also need WARM ORANGES and COOL ORANGES, as well, for specialised uses in the ORANGE SPACE.

the RGB space doesnt even believe in orange: it believes in red and green and blue.

(what do we do when all posts are TOCKY? we can tell tocky to shut up, but this is only for today. later there will be LESS TOCKY, and this is a shame, because noone else is saying what all these tockies are saying, even if we believe we have heard this message before )

we dont need to be told to listen to HELM because we have been listening to helm for something like 15 years. he is right but he is not the only right. HELM teaches us to use every color everwhere, PTOING teaches us all colors are good, ILKKE teaches us how to pixel as magentlemen, DAWNBRINGER teaches us we can blend blue and orange to get grey, and TOCKY can teach us all these things and more.

we choose our own gods.

 what solutions are there? we can BAN TOCKY, we can TELL TOCKY TO GO AWAY, or worse, we can TELL TOCKY HE IS WRONG: this is obliteration, anwe should allow tocky to blit his feelings onto our screens. because he will tell us what others will not.

(WHAT DOES HE MEAN TOO MUCH MODERATION? WHAT AN INSULT? DOES HE NOT FEAR GOD)



(WHAT DOES HE MEAN TOO MUCH MODERATION? WHAT AN INSULT? DOES HE NOT FEAR GOD)

TOCKY IS NOT THE NOISE I TELL YOU HE IS THE SINGLE. WE CAN BRING THE DAWN, BUT WE SHOULD BRING ALL OTHER TIMES AS WELL

i tell you: the dawnbringer palette is a blight upon right-thinking persons. not because it is bad but because it is canonical. it teaches us not to write our own palettes.

these forums are not something awful and should not resemble it - so yeah, the moderation here is bad because it is too good. its designed for arguing with trolls about the monad and not for talking about the pixel

i need to repeat this message. what i tell you n times is true. a moderation policy that does not allow the heretic TOCKY but does allow that fine hero SUPERB JOE is not GOOD MODERATION. ask yourself what it means to be moderate

games are supposed to have social justice in them. this is a message that should be heard.

EVERY PIXEL AND NOT-ALL-PIXELS is not the same message. they are counter-messages. each book should have its antibook, BORGES teaches us this.



4
General Discussion / on the virtues of mappin everything to everything else
« on: February 06, 2015, 06:33:45 pm »
(cross-posted from tigsource)

i tell you, if you are not interested in this topic, do not post here.

alright. this isnt the second campaign. that's june. this is the thread where tocky tells you what he's been working on lately. and this thread will not be a mighty thread that spans ten pages, or it might not be, because this would be too good, too perfect, and i promise you that this thread will be worse and not as good as we deserve, in the more-traditional tigsource style. i will pretend i am one of you and not some kind of strange space wizard. but let me tell you, i am that. i will smoke some weed so that - i will be more likely to forget what i am saying - and so i will be better at explaining all this weird space wizard math to you. for you, this thread is a gift. i know we have had our troubles, but i tell you this is true.

because i am now devoted to being WORSE and not BETTER in deference to those persons who do not wish to see me, i will keep everything in this first post, even my replies to things that other people have said in this thread. i am on tigsource. and i am asked to frame my replies a certain way. this is not as GOOD as replying in the way i am accustomed to to, but it allows me to respond and not tie up the archive and also to keep in accord with filthy accelerationist principles. i will blog SLOW in that thread, ie not as fast as before, but i will blog FASTER in this one, and also i will include a CHALLENGE at the end of this post, for you the reader, because i wish for you to respond, and also because there havent been any OFFICIAL COMPETITIONS LATELY.

so like, this is in the art forum. what are you working on lately, tocky? this is a bad question because it assumes an idea must be new to be worth your time. the BUDDHA is not a new idea, though, and the BUDDHA is worth money.

so i was thinking about the doom roguelike and i think it is a shame that there is only one doom roguelike. liek it is a good doom rogue but we deserve more of them. we should hug every doom. we should hug every rogue. and so we should hug every doomrogue - map all possible dooms onto all possible rogues.

so, while there is already a doom roguelike, we will make another doom roguelike. this is not as good as making a totally new mind blowing idea but we will try to sneak those into the game.

roguelikes are drawn in text mode - that is, using a symbolic palette - which means that we dont really need an artist, all we need is a programmer, or something better than a programmer.

roguelikes use a symbolic palette - the ascii range - and a color palette - whatever you like. lets say rgb333 so soething like the amstrad cpc.


http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13/tocky/rgb-8-bit.png

( btw i did not map this palette today - i mapped it a long time ago and you can see it on my livejournal http://ramirus.livejournal.com/ among other palettes that i mapped at that time - all these posts are good and tbh you can use the Good Ideas within if you wish, i will not try to sue you. if you use my ideas to make bad games, though i will not be super happy about this. this is one way to kill me. another way is to tell me that i am wrong, and not think about whether i am right. another way is to take a thing i like and then get a picture of calvin pissing on that thing and to show it to me. did you know that calvin was named for john calvin and hobbes for thomas hobbes? i have digressed. you can see that i made this map in a pixel artist way and not a programmer way, because i am more of a pixel purist and less of a programmer - like most of us here. )

i later realised that even here i am being not generous enough. we should use all colors and all symbols, and not just the ones our ancestors did. we should use every palette and not the same palette every time. but whatever, these small spaces are still nice. i would use them to make games and i have done this - only they are small.

so we have access to 32-bit color (do they have 64-bit color now?) and the entire unicode range including - and this is the best bit - all of the emojis. but also like the georgian characters, the han characters, futhark runes, everything you can think of. you name it, its in there. we can make roguelikes that show any of these symbols in any of these colors.

so we can map every color to every symbol, but even here we are not being generous enough. we will need a background and foreground color for a roguelike and - hey, why not map every symbol back onto every other symbol.

bgcolor * fgcolor * bgsymbol *fgsymbol

so now we have a symbol we draw in front, and the symbol we draw behind that, for example, but instead we could blend them or chop and screw them or animate attack and decay or or something. we could get a pixel artist to draw every combination but lets not do that because it seems exhausting.we do not want the pixel artist to be exhausted, we do not want him to be extinct, we do not want him to be dead. how can this best be achieved?

in fact you can map the symbols back on themselves 16 times, and so have 16 frames of animation to mess around with.

so instead of just one guy in a turban emoji we have, for each symbol - a guy in a turban emoji version of every symbol in every symbolic language we can name. and not just for guys in turbans, also for giraffes or whatever. you can get a giraffe dragon and a ghost dragon and a dragon king and a king dragon if you map every symbol onto every other symbol. all of these are good puns, good names, and good urls. but only two characters long, so not a set of initials (3) that you enter into the high score table, and not a set of knuckle tattoos (4-4), but any 2 possible characters (2). but (2) is also a devil-number, even if we need it for binary systems. i tell you we need non-binary systems. the only good number is not even (12), which has lots of factors, but (n) which has all factors.

anyway i realised all this later. what i have uses more-traditional but not truly traditional symbols of the atascii range - but, like, with the symbols we would need to make doom, and not for text mode apps on telnet or whatever. the default dwarf fortress character set is a 16block atascii or something like that - i made a 10block one that was a popular heresy for a while, i made my own custom palette also, and all this is good, but listen - this is still a community which also does not show me the respect i deserve, one which tbh doesnt value my input either, but whatever. i made a character set, a palette, and i was working on the dwarf emojis when mayday took over for me, which is awful nice of him all things considered but it is important to note that i would not ask for this. and so we have the mayday set and not the tocky set we would have, which tbh would have been better. it cant happen now because mayday beat me with my own product, which is something that happens in these places quite a lot. but whatever. games are cheap these days and now i have to sell you this, the good idea, when truly you should just wish to buy it from me. in any case i now give it freely: use it. i dont care. i will not sue you. when the mayday set was on the tigs frontpage, in a way, i was on the front page - but not truly. i give you the doomscii (this is actually the second version, the first one had more likes on twitter, but i doubt anyone actually uses it because its sort of still a work-in-progress and i hadnt checked every tile for errors. but this one is more sound - it's rigorous - because it lines up with the grid better and if you find any errors ill try to fix them - i did this stuff in game maker 8, the last-good one, because i like the tile editor even though it is not the best tile editor. in the pixel editor in game maker 8 you can set up the grid to be whatever you want, different on the x and y axis, choose what color you want it to be, all this good stuff. you need to be able to see the grid when you draw this kind of thing. in a more-good tile editor than the game maker room editor id be able to zoom and use palettes and stuff, but i digress, heres the doomscii-v2, the one that should always work (but if theres still errors pls help me fix them) )

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13/tocky/bg0.png


this might not look like much to you, but i promise you this: it is the monad.

these tiles are 12 by 12 and this is not by accident. i understand that 12 is not a power of 2, but its actually better than a power of 2, because it has more factors which means more good ways to slice it. thirds, sixths, halfs or quarters.

why would you want to break a tile into thirds? well you know how you do that 3-by-3 block thing, usually with with some extra inside corners so that you can make an autotile? well here you can treat each symbol like that, and the code for this isnt even super hard to do. all that matters is that you should want to have 12blocks instead of 8blocks or 16blocks - in fact this is intuitive. a programmer would tell you different, and this is what happened when i first came to the pixel art community - i switched from intuitive 12-blocks to traditional 8-blocks because i was told, immediately, they are more-right. but they're not really.

anyway - most of you are pixel purists like me, and and not programmers. many of you are pixel artists that have had to learn to be programmers. but in the future you will not have to be programmers because mcc or someone will have solved the problem. thats the most-good thing that could happen but this thing that is happening to you right now is still a good thing. now we're thinking with lizards: how can i make the all-games while not actually doing very much work?

but as pixel artists you can still get some use out of this thing: why not edit it to be more like the doomscii you would make? why not edit to still be a rogue but not a doom-rogue? put in mermaids or something.

as bonus content: i will also give you panels and bubbles:

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13/tocky/bgb.png


so now we can make bullets and speech bubbles and particle effects and walls and stuff.

i realised after playin with the first set that i would need these tiles, also. but maybe we can do better than this: can you think of a set of 255 tiles that we havent defined that could fit in with these pages - do you think we could make a book of 16 pages that would contain all of the symbols we might want for a doomrogue game? what should go on those pages, then? if you tell me a good-enough idea for a third page, i will try to make it.

i have told you that 12 is better than 16 and yet i am still chained to this heretic number 16. can you make a set of 144 tiles that is better than this 256 tile map?

all of this should come to pass. should this scare us? wont it make pixel artists extinct? well obviously lots of people don't prefer roguelikes to not-roguelikes. but we can revolutionise games in the same way that we can with roguelikes - by understanding the block, the gender, the monad. it is not enough to ask, should we make these games - they are already being made. we should ask, how can we best make these games, in a way that still respects the work of creators? because i do not wish to make pixel artists extinct. noone should have to be dead in 2015. i wish to accelerate the discourse. i wish for the function of the pixel and of the artist to be better understood.

as a bonus content: my dad always framed my sexuality in terms of my little sister's sexuality. if i look at porn thats bad because what if my little sister found out about porn? this is not good for me and it's not good for my sister. it's not even good for my dad. there's a reason i dont call my dad more often. and there's a reason i dont come to tigsource more often.

so like, im not your dad and you're not mine. neither one of us is the other one's dad. each of us should be self-moderating and i understand that this is hard. why, tocky, would you ask me to consider sexuality - gender - a valid part of pixel art? why not?

doomscii's kind of a dumb pun and i apologise for it. but its also the monad, the gender, the block:

bg = doom * scii 
col = r * g * b
bgcol = bg * col

and then we can have as many bgcols as we need:

bgcol * bgcol * bgcol ...

this is an extensible language for roguelikes but more than this - it's an extensible language for dreams. its the monad. welcome to the lizard mud. we have the monad, and we have copy-and-paste, so we also have object-orientation. welcome to the lizard moo. but listen - read A RAPE IN CYBERSPACE. it's more likely than you think.

the maths is good when you map everything onto everything because it's not heavily notational - easy to read. this is a good language for games because it's easier to teach. this is why we should study puns and lyric poems and emotions and language and cellular automata and procedural generation, and the difference between motif and gender, and homestuck troll romance and the critter code and the nerd code and dragon code. this is why we should study transgenderism and transhumanism. because we wish to. can we make a doom where you can talk to the monsters? and if not why not? dont those monsters deserve to speak and have opinions about stuff, to argue with one another, and to be right? dont they deserve to be alive and not dead? i tell you we can take all those people who are not alive and bring them to life on our screens. have you played STRANGETHINKS SECRET HABITAT yet? bc that is a game that understands the monad.

so listen, i have come back. i will not be stopped. i could post all this shit somewhere else but im gonna post it here too. please make use of these concepts and symbols.

welcome to the new game, which is LEGACY. welcome to the new game, which is LEGION - this is lizard moo. welcome to the new meme. welcome to the new flesh. welcome to the lizard race.

i understand the monad and it is lizard people. the virtues of mappin everything to everything else



the first campaign is the treatises: https://plus.google.com/+MattRundle/posts/Ua5dRLJpH9J
the second campaign i will talk about morrowind and how it is not the best game because it is not the monad. but it is better than what we have now.

i should mention that i am devoted to being worse and not better on tigsource, but here on wayofthepixel i can be better and not worse.

5
Pixel Art / cpc animalmen
« on: July 04, 2010, 02:10:59 am »

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13/tocky/cpc-animalmen-colortest.png

I'm coming up on the end of this thing but I'm spotting a recurring problem I have with materials, or texture or whatever. I don't know if this is a pixel problem really but it's a problem I keep having.

I feel like i'm just blocking colours on top of one another. I try to play attention to the light and how it hits and what it hits but mostly what i end up doing is blocking on colors and adding more lights or shadows, or mixing at the edges where it looks wrong - which works okay, but it kinda keeps me from making anything that looks properly hairy or leathery or whatever - i rely on the colours a whole lot. Can I maybe get some pointers on how to handle this stuff?

6
General Discussion / history of grotesque fantasy art
« on: June 25, 2009, 05:57:25 pm »
I'm looking to start an investigation into the history of grotesque fantasy art, as typified in rpg manuals and sourcebooks, western comics and pulp fiction, japanese comics and pulp fiction, animation, and game concept art.

the best-known pioneers in this space are probably Frazetta in the west and Miyazaki in the east, though there are many others and there are much older things integrated - the themes and many of the techniques inherent to this sort of art can be traced at least as far back as the renaissance, and people like Hieronymous Bosch, and beyond that into classical antiquity.  There is a long and colourful history of mannerist art and romantic art, but I'm trying to refer specifically to works used to illustrate fantasy texts or populate imaginary worlds, arising since the rise of popular science fiction (such as the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne). I'm especially interested in works created in the latter half of the twentieth century, and especially published fiction illustrations, including comics and video game stuff.

I say 'probably' Frazetta and Miyazaki because I'm not truly familiar with the history of modern fantasy art and how far back it goes, though this is what I'm intending to discover.

So, what I'm hoping to do first is to populate a list of seminal artists and seminal works, as well as popular artists and popular works, as well as publications I should look into. Any contributions are appreciated, feel free to post images in this thread.

7
Pixel Art / blocky animation experiment
« on: June 16, 2009, 07:16:31 pm »
say you're animating in an especially blocky environment (like a widepixel game or a voxel game, or really tiny or something) and you need to animate using a really constrained set of movements - using all 90 degree angles. I wanted to know if I could get reasonably natural-looking character movements this way.

(this is brought on by the recent influx of voxel games, like infiniminer and minecraft - i don't think the characters in those worlds integrate well, because their movements aren't suitably blocky.)

here's what I've got:

I'm only bending the dude at the shoulders, hips, elbows, and knees.


8
Pixel Art / more spectrum dragon
« on: June 11, 2009, 01:23:29 pm »
pencil sketch: http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13/tocky/dragon10jun09.jpg




trying to see how far i can push this thing and keep to spectrum restrictions, thought I should get some people to look at it.
(spectrum: two colours per 8*8, each tile is either bright or dark, can't be both)


9
General Discussion / pixel art, games
« on: March 13, 2009, 03:37:39 am »
this brought on by helm's ramblethread, but these ideas seem basically out of place there, this is nothing really to do with pixel art as techniques.

(my claim is that) success in art is making stuff that is:

representational - that clearly presents your view of its subject, and
compelling - that affects opinion about the subject, for some targeted group.

Of course, swaying opinion is only a secondary goal, making compelling stuff that does not truly represent your views is failure. Making stuff that represents your views but which does not affect opinion is a form of success, somewhat limited by the fact that nobody else knows that you have been successful.

Looping back to pixel art.
I think pixel art is a very effective medium. It enforces a strong aesthetic, and is inherently compelling. But to some extent it's popularity is linked to video games, and also video games don't much use pixel art any more. What does that mean?

I believe these things about pixel art:
-it is compelling.
-in most people's minds, it is inherently linked to video games.

so people can draw either of these assumptions:
- pixel art is inherently compelling, because the techniques employed are inherently pleasant.
- pixel art is compelling by association, because it is linked with video games.

There are other factors that exist, surely - but I am convinced that both of these statements are true to some degree. The main question I'd like to pose is this: if pixel art is estranged from video games - is that a good thing for pixel art?

I don't believe there are many among us here who love pixel art and do not love either old games, or old technology. As this other stuff falls into obscurity, what will that mean for pixel art? Will new people continue to pick it up?

How many of those here make a living doing pixel art? How many are employed in the games industry? Is there any other viable way to do it?

The link to video games is limiting in a very basic sense: If you try to tackle subjects that aren't games using pixel art, some game-ness seeps in. Obviously that's not appropriate, in a lot of cases. Do people have this trouble?

And so forth. I don't think many here need convincing that pixel art is a viable artform, in isolation of video games. But there's long been a strong relationship between the two, and pixel art still holds a strong video game association. I'd like to hear what people think about this.

10
Pixel Art / ANCIENT RITE of DRAGONS [wip]
« on: February 14, 2009, 02:49:35 pm »

Spectrum restrictions (hopefully):

two colours per 8*8
can't use a light colour and a dark colour on the same 8*8
black is both a light and a dark colour.

15 colours total:

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