A good weekend for game programming

Yesterday I found a nice source of free art for games! There's apparently a thing called RPG Toolkit with a community of people who make tile art for it. Unfortunately, the art is distributed in some weird format, "TST". I spent Friday night writing a PNG converter in Script though, and it works super great:

( Screenshot may be wider than some monitors )

That's Hippo running a Map Maker toy I threw together so I could try out some of the tiles. Eventually I'll be able to save maps made in there and make games around them (for values of "eventually" equal to or less than "next weekend").

The other cool thing I found this weekend was this guy, who is going to make three hundred game designs (one a day or so) and put them up with cool retro pixel art concept images. The designs are mostly neato and mostly involve the kind of game programming I like to do.

I should expand on that some. There are a few styles of game and styles of game art I like, and I really can live without the rest. 3D things, for example, generally don't excite me.

I think game art reached its peak in about 1993. VGA, 256-color, 320x240 resolution. MIDI music piped through an AdLib soundcard. I love every bit of it. Animated backgrounds done with palette shifting, and the whole screen done with pixel art. Sprites. Tiled maps.

Part of it is that those graphics don't distract from the game. You don't waste time writing reflective water or money on hardware to render it. Part of it is that with VGA, everyone was on a pretty level playing field. Anyone with a free weekend could write a pixel art editor. 3D models aren't like that. Part of it, of course, was that without being able to wow people with shiny graphics, game designers needed more of a game than "kill ten bugbears and then come back here" for three hundred hours.

You can go too far in the other direction. I think ASCII games are pretty much tapped out, except for interactive fiction. 8-bit VGA is a happy medium.

I'm probably going to blow up those tiles so that they look bigger and blockier on modern screens.