I’ve got two ideas for this weekend.  I’m pretty sure I’ll do #2, but it sounds hard, with lots of math.  I don’t like math.

#1 - Pixel Editor

This is a unique idea.  It’s a paint program, with features intended for pixel art, lots of zooming and whatnot.  So what’s special?  Well, it can ‘render’ in various ways.  Think of the Puppygames type of look - big pixelated things, but they’re done up all nice in photoshop with glowing outlines or whatever.  You can take your pixel creation (zoomed in to at least 2x) and render it with several different effects, saving your work in a 32bit png:

- An outer glow around it in whatever color you like

- ‘Tetris blocks’ (each pixel is a shiny block rather than a single color)

- An overall highlight, treating the whole shape as one huge tetris block - if a pixel has no left neighbor, shade its left edge, if it has no right neighbor, brighten its right edge, etc

- ‘Piping’, highlighted stripes on the internal edges of the shape

- Other!?

I think that would be a really cool tool for making that nice modern-retro art.  Almost a SFXr for graphics, in a way.

#2 - Hitsuji Editor

I saw people talking about doing this in the chat too.  They called it a manikin editor.  I just want to take the concept of the editor I made for my long-ago LD entry Hitsuji and make it nice and more powerful, so you can do freeform creations instead of sheep holding swords.  The concept is to make models by stringing bitmaps together with pivot points, then you can rotate and translate them all (scaling would be nice too).  Then you make animations for them, and it stores it all much like a 3D model, only it’s 2D.  Then obviously you can put that in a game and animate it all nicely and smoothly.  I love how it’s trivial for such a model to transition from one animation to another.  I could see a lot of potential for games made with these types of characters.

#1 sounds a lot easier than #2, and it’s more original.  But it’s definitely not as useful…

Tags: mini ld

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 5:51 am and is filed under MiniLD #3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.