As Gramham van de Ruit tweeted about a Sudoku Generator for InDesign I had to look up the possibilities of making such a tool for Scriptographer. I’ve had this idea before but I’ve never put any effort into it. Not surprisingly, it is a fairly complex matter. Fortunately, a friendly soul, named David J. Rager, had posted the source code of his online javascript Sudoku Generator (+solver) on his blog. Being the opportunist that I am I quickly “borrowed” (well, he said it was free to use) his code and from that it was an oh-so-easy task to just wrap some Sg code around it for use in Illustrator!
The script generates puzzles and renders them in full vector. Everything; the frame, hints and a non-visible solution, are included inside a group object. Find it here.
Some nice looking retro nostalgia. I’ve forgotten where I found them. Just thought I’d post them cause they’re nice to look at.
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There are times – not very often, but it happens – that I wish I had a PC. Gunpoint, by Tom Francis, is an upcomnig game that REALLY makes that feeling stronger. These lovely screenshots seem to include just about everything I love in a game such as sneaky spies with trenchcoats and beautiful, retro pixel bonanza. It’s almost like Flashback and Impossible Mission had a threeway with Infiltrator!
Please, Tom, release this for OSX and/or iOS!!!
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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.
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What serendipity.
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.
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I have bundled together a collection of swatches based on old computers and video games that may come in handy for any project involving the retro style of games from the 80′s, pixelart or whatnot. Most colors come from various Wikipedia articles such as these two [1, 2], so I can’t vouch for their fidelity, except for the gamma corrected Commodore 64 which is probably as close to the original as humanly possible.
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This is about a font that I made. Scroll down to the end of it for the moneyshot or read the boring backstory involving nuclear weapons, megalomaniacal behavior and messianic complex.
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Some days ago I found a paper entitled ‘Procedural modelling of cities‘ written by Parish and Müller (creators of CityEngine), and was reminded of Introversion‘s game-in-progress Subversion.
Procedural generated cities produce some rather interesting patterns so I started to look around for more code and found the Suicidator City Generator, a free Python script for Blender.
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After I made the Saville script I spent alot of time reading the reference pages on Scriptographer and discovered the possibility to place an arbitrary path onto a bitmap picture and then color the path with the average color from that area. This got me thinking that I could make a variant of the Saville [more…]
