Please, Tom, release this for OSX and/or iOS!!!

Far from being as violent as the Judge Dredd story; Block Mania (although I’d squeeze in a reference to Old Stoney Face any chance I get), I’ve spent a few evenings drawing a bunch (and more to come) of isometric blocks. Isometric tile editors are usually associated with pixelart, not vectors, so my original intent was to script a tool in which I could sculpt with these blocks. I discarded that idea after realizing it would be a massive undertaking and not a very stable solution. Not really knowing what I would do with them, I continued drawing anyway, as I’m just so fond of isometric projection, as evident in one of my earlier posts.

This fascination stems back to the days or yore when I was playing games on my Amiga 500 (those where the days!) such as Marble Madness, Populous and D/Generation to name a few. Well, not to mention cyberpunk-awesomeness Syndicate, of which there are rumors that swedish Starbreeze Studios will “reinvent”.

Anyway, I ended up with all these building blocks, wanting to create miniature worlds (there it is again, my megalomaniacal behavior), but not wanting to manually drag them into place and having to adjust the layer order all the time.

The solution – which might not be the best in terms of time efficiency – was to script a little tool that could parse a text file into a nested array representing the X, Y and Z-axis. Instead of handling mouse events and coming up with a smart solution as to how I was going to manage selection of blocks (which most likely would have to involve some inconvenient keyboard input), I just lay my “world” out on graph-paper, an excel document or such; one sheet per level, like this.

Perhaps time consuming, but I think it could work to my advantage, having to carefully plan ahead instead of throwing myself Head Over Heels (isometric pun intended).

And to top it off, here’s some isometric galore to – literally – fill your screen with!

Left to right: Syndicate, Populous, Cadaver, Darkmere, Uropa², Marble Madness, D/Generation, Head Over Heels and Escape From The Planet Of Robot Monsters.

There I’m sitting, at work, the time is 03:22am and for some reason I’m googling pictures of the old boardgame HeroQuest when one image catches my eye. It’s by this guy; Mattias Gustavsson, posted over at RetroGameDev, who has made a pixel shader for a project he’s working on. The shader makes your images look like tmhey are viewed on an old worn-out TV. As it happens, Mattias made an executable of his filter, but unfortunately, it’s for Windows only…

As I’m in love with (or, at least, very fond of) all things retro, this was right up my alley. Clearly, nostalgia is the proof of that you’re getting older.

The picture above is from the Amiga version of HeroQuest, borrowed – without permission – from Kim Lemon’s wonderful site LemonAmiga (also check out his Lemon64 site, if your old enough to remember that one). I ran this image through Mattias’ filter and merged the result with the original as a comparison. I find the latter, with its smoother appearance, much more pleasing to the eye. It’s also more how I remember it looked back in the day when I used to play this game on a crappy old 15″ TV. Not at all those crisp, but dead, pixels you get on a new LCD display.

I would love to have his pixel shader as a Photoshop Action so I could combine it with Philip “Pepto” Timmermann‘s C64 Palette for that full-on, ultra-high, retro feel of 8-bit games.

Above; first one is a guesstimated C64 palette, the second is rendered with the “real” C64 palette (mentioned above), the third one is the same as the second but have had Mattias Gustavsson’s filter applied to it. Now, if that doesn’t take you back, I don’t know what does!

I don’t know how he made it, but if I was to venture a guess, I would say that he first applied a layer of interlaced scanlines on both axis as the picture is twice the size afterwards. Then it seems that the picture is somewhat blured to imitate the not-so-sharp image of a CRT television as well as some color correction and/or color cast. Finally, there is a fair amount of RGB shifting by offsetting the three color channels in different directions. Then again, he could be doing something else entirely. It is, however, one of the more authentic looking effects I’ve seen in a while.

And, while we’re at the topic of old displays, check out Secret Geometry‘s beautiful terminal emulator made as a monochrome monitor. Very Pipboy-ish…

A while back I mentioned the innovative game developers Introversion Software and in 2006 they released a game called DEFCON which caught my eye with its striking visuals and strong allusions to the 80′s kult-classic movie WarGames.

DEFCON is sort of a modern-day version of the old Amiga classic Nuclear War (which, in turn, was based on Flying Buffalo‘s card-game designed by Douglas Malewicki), sans the comedy.

“Gentlemen. You can’t fight in here. This is the war room.”

Ok, I admit. It’s a poor comparison, they are not even close, but both games does allow you (and, in fact, encourage you) to nuke the hell out of your opponents. Anyhow, DEFCON seem to have some very dedicated fans and a thriving modding community and voices where raised in the games forum expressing a wish to change the games default typeface (which seems to be Kremlin from DaFont by Vic Fieger) to more resemble that from the WarGames movie. I was surprised that there were no one who had already made it so I thought that this would be a fun thing to try out. Maybe if I reproduced it and gave it away for free, they would look at me in awe and accept me as their one, true saviour…

Well, most likely not, but still as I said, a fun project so I took some screenshots of some letters from the movie and drew them in Illustrator. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get screenshots of the complete alphabet so some of them are my own interpretation of what I think they would look like. They’re all caps and I intend to make two versions, one monospaced and one kerned. I still don’t know the name of the original font and truth be told I haven’t made that much research in the matter, either. So, it seem fit to name the typeface after the movies main antagonist, the AI – Joshua.

“Would you like to play a game?”

I am fairly happy with the outcome, being my first attempt at making a font, and I guess the plan is to turn it all to a working typeface, but right now it just seem to be too much of tedious tweaking and manual fiddling about. Guess my lack of persistence and laziness outweighs my messianic complex…

Some rainy day, maybe.

Jared Tarbell’s homepage Complexification is another page I had found earlier. He has made some amazing scripts using Processing and his random line, water color script very much resembles a huge city viewed from above.Anyway, I threw myself head-over-heels into this undertaking and spent two nights trying to make my own city generator and came up with this.Now, I must say that it looks fairly satisfying but it only works a fraction of the times I run it and I have no control over any of the parameters I should be able to control such as population density, map type (raster, radial or a mix of the two), road curvature, road classes and their potential to spawn new branches.

As in Introversion’s Subversion I guess that I would have to make use of some complex L-system but that is a little too much above my competence level, for the moment.