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…

Apparently, ALL the Commodore 64 emulators out there are mapping the colors somewhat wrong. Philip ‘Pepto’ Timmermann, on the other hand, has made an incredible job to get the colors right. He has a very comprehensive page explaining his method of getting the ‘true colors’ of the c64 here.

A comparison between the emulated colors and the ‘true colors’, as seen below, shows that the latter is much more muted and dull but in fact closer to how the colors were actually processed.

Well, enough of the ol’ c64. There are a lot more swatches but they are much more straight forward so I won’t be going through them all. Here’s just a few.

Amstrad CPC system:

Apple II:

Nintendo 8-bit:

The idea is to limit one selfs creative process by using only the colors provided by each system.

Listed below are all these different systems that are included in my Retro Color Swatch Pack.

• Amstrad CPC
• Apple II
• Atari 2600 NTSC
• Atari 2600 PAL
• CGA
• Commodore 64
• Commodore Plus/4
• Commodore VIC-20
• EGA
• Gameboy
• Mattel Aquarius
• MSX
• Nintendo 8-bit
• Sega Master System
• Teletext
• Thomson MO5
• ZX Spectrum

This worked just fine. However the math to build the isometric blocks turned out to be somewhat tricky for someone like me who had virtualy no experience in programming.

It creates a kind of retro game feeling, almost like that old Marble Madness game I played in my early teens.

Unfortunately, there are some memory constrains and speed issues when working with javascript in Illustrator so if I wanted to produce this effect for every pixel in a picture it would have to be a small bitmap in order to avoid a memory overflow error. But as an abstract blocky isometric picture generator it works just fine!