I have been experimenting with different kinds of raster effects lately. Not really breaking any new grounds here but it is fun to try to come up with new stuff and just to play around for a while. The hardest part is to find a suitable image to apply these effects on and most of [more…]
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
