(I fell in love with) the Majesty of Colors

Have you ever dreamt that you were a gargantuan creature dwelling deep in the cold darkness of the ocean’s bottom, reaching to the light above with your myriad of tentacles, observing these little warm creatures of flesh, maybe catching one of them and drawing down to the murky depths below?…

What? No, me neither, just asking.

Yet apparently some of us have this kind of dreams and take this matter one step further, creating a game that allows player to control such a creature. That’s what “(I fell in love with) the Majesty of Colors” is all about – the process of discovery and interaction through three eyes of tentacled sea monster, all in delightfully retro graphics.

Note: I like retro visuals, but I am not too keen on pixel art abuse – just because it’s easier to make blocky pixelated sprites doesn’t mean the game is going to look good. Sometimes, however, pixel art really does become art (in real word, too, on rare occasions) and as a result right now I can’t imagine “Majesty of Colors” in any other graphical form.

I don’t want to spoil the pleasure of finding out how the game works, so I will not elaborate further on the gameplay itself. Remember, it’s up to you to discover how to play it and what to do, and the outcome will vary depending on that.

This touches the subject I want to tackle in more detail here on Barts News one day, as well as exploit myself: games are an excellent medium to tell a story that has visual appeal, builds ambience in a cinematic sense and has one advantage over movies and TV – player interaction and multiple variants. Traditional storytelling cannot give you what games can – influence over story itself, pushing heroes to act more to our liking, ultimately achieving different endings in functioon of player’s choices.

“(I fell in love with) the Majesty of Colors” is but a short little game, but it does exactly that – presents different story arch and ending based on player’s decision. As simple and limited as it is gameplay-wise and story-wise, it has an original concept, innovative idea of playing, multiple endings and one or two brilliant moments, my favourite one being the opening, when a little baloon makes the creature see colors.

Go ahead and play it, the experience will be worth it. And if you are an aspiring game creator, read wonderfully detailed post mortem on GameSetWatch to see how the author made it happen.

Games’n’ Girls Calendars for 2009

Right about time to shop for a new calendar for 2009 – and what better for a lonely geek than a calendar that combines their two fetishes, games and girls?

I have taken the ungrateful task of finding appropriate products for your viewing pleasure and voila! the results are presented below.

First comes the ever tasty Nerdcore callendar (I still am in love with the girl from 2007 wearing Nintendo Power Glove):

Secondly, gaming site GameOps also has prepared a little something for male gamers, and their choice of ladies is excellent, even if they all look like taken from the same game :

And surprisingly, Russians also have games’n'girls calendars (although in Russia the girl calendar watches you, ba-dum-psh!) and while some photos are not that hot, it still is good enough to provide you with a link to it, if only because of Mario girl:

So there you have it, make your choice ladies and gentlemen, make your choice. Me? I’ll stick to Playboy’s calendar this year, but hush!, don’t tell my girlfriend.

Ah, one more thing. Kind folks from GameOps have assembled a really cool looking video preview of their calendar and I wouldn’t be my usual filthy chauvinist self if I didn’t put it here for you:

So once again – Happy New Year!

Av(i)aritia

Avaritia is the Latin word for greed and, in Sesame Street style, it is a sponsor of today’s note.

There are two very interesting free online applications I started using in their infancy (that is when they were still beta). I really liked the results I got and I planned to write about both of them. Unfortunately, both of them became non-free when their creators realised they could be making money out of it.

The first application was VectorMagic. In short, a great online tool for vectorizing images, yielding excellent results in most cases, especially with complex shapes and multiple colours. Used it, loved it – until it suddenly became non-free.

This is particularly nasty case – free for a long time, published at first at Stanford website, no mentions of any possibility of the application ever going to the market. Then one day, bam, out of the blue it changes website, becomes regular pay-for-use service and starts charging (not just a nickel) its users. Had I seen this coming, I would have scanned some of my art in advance, really. Going from “hey, we’re educational institution and we have this cool free tool for you to use” to “it’s a state-of-the-art professional software, so cough up buddy” was like a slap in the face. Steven Clark wrote a very thorough and detailed justification why he thinks it was a bad decision, so I don’t have anything to add here. I wouldn’t have put it better in word myself. Tsk, tsk. Shame on you, folks.

The second application was Aviary – a promising internet suite of different graphical (and in future perhaps more than that) tools realised in Flex technology. While in the beginnning it was free for beta-users, now it became a commercial service. At least they didn’t promise to be free forever.

Out of these two, I think Aviary has better chances of success, because the folks behind it seem to rely more on community and a wealth of functions than single pay-per-use feature. Restricting access to anything but Phoenix editor and placing watermarks for someone who decides not to pay, however, doesn’t sound like fun, especially since there are many free online alternatives to what really boils down to a little more funky image editor. Maybe the community part will make up for it, I am not sure.

Don’t get me wrong – I am all for authors getting paid for their hard work, but I also am fan of freebies, cheap alternatives and solutions that go beyond “pay or be gone” schema. Additionally, in both cases I felt that the amount of money one would have to pay for functionality at hand is a little too much for a home user – especially when it attacks me out of nowhere (I’m looking at you, VectorMagic).

So there you have it. Two cool applications, but unfortunately not free. Two disappointments for students, users from poorer countries, people that don’t have credit cards, and those still infected with “Linux mentality”. Two approaches – one slightly better than the other, but still not fully satisfying. I thought they were both interesting enough to warrant a mention on Barts News nevertheless, but when it comes to me, I think I’ll stick to trustworthy combination of Gimp, Inkscape and Blender.

The Tao of Visualisation

Investigating the topic of visualisation of social networks that I have written about recently, I have come across VisualComplexity.Com, a great source of information on visualisation of various networks. Here’s what they say about it:

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.

On their main page there are links to different visualisation projects, complete with short description and accompanying images. I have to say that some of them are really beautiful, true bridge between the worlds of art and science, with the exquisite presentation layer serving as the means of conveying actual information. Observe some samples below (and head to the project list on Visual Complexity for more):

Useful and very pretty (if only all women could be too), some of these projects almost make me regret having left my academic career related to visualisation. Also, as a result of visiting numerous sites related to the aforementioned projects, I have stumbled upon this beautiful videoclip prepared by user flight404 (check his blog for more cool things) :

Is there anyone who dares to claim that art and science can’t go hand in hand?

Liquid scaling in Gimp

This is not exactly fresh news per se, but an interesting information nonetheless. What triggered my long overdue post was the information about certain feature coming to Photoshop CS4, the feature in question being content-aware scaling or, more precisely, seam carving.

First of all, have a look at the movie below explaining what this term even means:

Okay, with that out of the way let us continue.

Now, the normal course of action in the software world is that commercial programs (especially famous juggernauts, such as aforementioned Photoshop) introduce new cool features that free software clumsily tries to catch up with. When it finally does, the commercial software puts the pedal to the metal, accelarates and introduces new, more advanced features. Free software then tries to follow, rinse and repeat. That’s what happens, right?

Wrong. This is not always the case.

Check this post on Seam Carving being introduced in Photoshop CS4 (you can find more details in this article), then have a look at this article on PolishLinux.org – don’t worry, the article is in English. It is quite cool that free Gimp has the same feature available, even though it is not built-in, but requires a plugin. Also, it’s free (contrary to Photoshop), but what makes it really uber-cool is that Gimp has had this feature for almost a year now – just compare the dates. A-ha!

Liquid Rescale plugin in action (taken from Focused on Light weblog)

I am not a drooling Free Software or Open Source fanboy, I do realise that it has its fair share disadvantages (and one huge advantage – meaning he price or rather the lack of thereof) and limitations, but as someone coming from a country where for a long time commercial software would cost half of ones salary, I do have a soft spot for free software in general.

I also know that the comparison of two implementations of seam carving algorithm would be necessary to really judge how well they can compete against each other, but I can’t help but feel a little spark of mischevous joy seeing Open Source software sometimes leading one step before the commercial software, hence this post.

You can download Liquid Rescale plugin here and see some interesting examples here and in Flickr gallery. Good job, guys!

Dot Matrix Revolution

In order to make waiting for some juicier post more bearable, here’s a little video showing computer development in form of animated pixel art (although not displayed via windows this time):

DOT MATRIX REVOLUTION* from superbrothers on Vimeo

I am totally under its retro charm, but would like to know: does it work only on corporate software developers? Or maybe some normal people would also find it cute? Let me know through comments.

Window Pixel Art

Who said that Pixel Art is only limited to computer screen? Give computer science students a building and what you get is thirteen storey high pixel art, more or less serious. Let’s begin with the first kind:

Now, you might need a bit of explanation on what it is that you are seeing here (and in the photo below). These two buildings are student dormitories of Politechnika Łódzka, my alma mater that I still have love-hate relationship with. The images, created by students turning their lights on and off in an organized manner, were the part of mourning after John Paul II’s death in 2005. In Poland it was fashionable to show the overwhelming grief at that time, so I guess students jumped on that wagon too and used dorms’ surface to express it.

Fun fact: I have been copying gigabytes of porn in one of the rooms shown in the above photo from a friend who lived there – although not exactly at the time the photo was taken. Not sure how that relates to the whole mourning slash grieving after Pope’s death phenomenon, but it was the first thought that came to my mind after seeing this (the second one being “wow, I wonder if some couples were getting it on in one of the dark rooms…“).

Even though the previous example is relatively non-game related (still, pixel art!), it provides nice introduction to digital expression via building lights and from there I’ll smoothly transition to a more advanced student project named Projekt Piwo (Project Beer) at Politechnika Wrocławska.

Unfortunately, those guys don’t have any good photos on their website, but check the following two movies: one showing Knight Rider theme and the other one displaying a game of Snake. Right, so it’s not really interactive though, it’s just a prepared animation, but notice that they use two window / pixel colours: yellowish and red. I find it pretty cool, actually.

I bet that now you can’t help but wonder – is there an interactive building display out there somewhere? Could we actually be playing Snake on the building? The answer to that is Blinkenlights:

Blinkenlights are taking window pixel art concept one step further. Not only can a user program what is to be displayed on the building via a dedicated application to program your their own display patterns, but also play a game of Pong or Tetris on the building front – read more about the games here.

If you are into “All your base are belong to us” meme, you will enjoy the following Blinkenlights backstage video even more, but even if you are normal not interested, do yourself a favour and have a look at how cool looks in action.

From mourning to arcade classics, the phenomena of window pixel art is definitely something I found worth of bringing to your attention.

Art of Oddworld Inhabitants online!

I have a soft spot for artbooks – though unfortunately I rarely had funds to buy them. On the top of my list of coveted items was The Art of Oddworld Inhabitants: The First Ten Years (along with Imaginary Friends Studios artbooks bundle – too bad it sold out). Unfortunately, the price tag of 60USD made it quite problematic for me when I was still a student – and probably I was not alone.

Well, cheapskates of the world, I have good news for you: you can find this wonderful artbook on Google Books project. While of course good number of pages are not available for viewing, most of the book is. If you are into graphic design, game art or simply interesting visuals – do yourself a favour and have a look.

If you haven’t ever come across Oddworld Inhabitants, if name Lorne Lanning doesn’t ring any bells, then why are you even reading this? Click the links above, watch this animation, join the ranks of fans of Oddworld and pray that Citizen Siege sees the light of the day some time in 2009…

Art of Oddworld Inhabitants online!

I have a soft spot for artbooks – though unfortunately I rarely had funds to buy them. On the top of my list of coveted items was The Art of Oddworld Inhabitants: The First Ten Years (along with Imaginary Friends Studios artbooks bundle – too bad it sold out). Unfortunately, the price tag of 60USD made it quite problematic for me when I was still a student – and probably I was not alone.

Well, cheapskates of the world, I have good news for you: you can find this wonderful artbook on Google Books project. Wihle of course good number of pages are not available for viewing, there’s a good deal of the book is viewable. If you are into graphic design, game art or simply interesting visuals – do yourself a favour and have a look.

If you haven’t ever come across Oddworld Inhabitants, if name Lorne Lanning doesn’t ring any bells, then why are you even reading this? Click the links above, watch this animation, join the ranks of fans of Oddworld and pray that Citizen Siege sees the light of the day some time in 2009…

Pac-man in space. On drugs.

I just came across this explanation to what Pac-man game really is all about:

I must say that this is … creative. Not bad for reinterpretation of this:

And speaking of Pac-man, don’t forget about this and this. Wicked!