I'm No Rock Star

With a new baby and three other children in my home, it's been difficult for me to do any coding projects outside of my day job lately. It's difficult just to make sure the comics are there every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It's difficult to wake up in the morning.

So there might not be a lot of good programming-related content on here for a little while. Maybe there never is any good programming content. Today's comic once again pokes fun at the need for organizations to hire mythical software developers that can perform 10 times the work of "regular" software devs like myself. I'm no Rock Star Programmer. But then, who is?

I spent a lot of time here.

Maybe Tim Sweeney. I would have to say that his 1991 game ZZT is one of the main reasons I am a software developer today. I spent uncountable hours not only playing that game, but also using the bundled editor to create my own game worlds. I never saw a need for games to use anything other than Code Page 437 for their graphics.

Code Page 437 - The only graphics you'll ever need

Many of my early programming projects were making my own game engines like ZZT with features I had wished for in Sweeney's game. It inspired me to write more software. When I started writing BBS door games in the early 90's, I dreamed of making an online multi-player game like ZZT using ANSI escape codes delivered via 14.4Kbps modems. Unfortunately, I had to go to high school and stuff most of the day and I never really got very far with it. I had to settle for making a few dollars off of in-game modules for Legend of the Red Dragon. The lesser-known sequel to LoRD ended up being extremely close to my vision, but never saw the kind of popularity of the original.

ZZT has always stuck with me as a gaming ideal.

• Why don't all games come with editors for making your own worlds? (I've had to seek out some unauthorized editors like Lunar Magic in the past, but Super Mario Maker looks like a winner)
• Graphics don't matter as much as player engagement. ZZT's ASCII graphics were already dated when it came out. Who cares?
• Community matters. People shared their own ZZT worlds on BBS's. It wasn't a "forced" community like the Facebook-integrated games of today.

That's enough of my ramblings and nostalgia for now. Check out today's comic. As usual, it asks the tough questions. Like why do we hire Rock Stars instead of Country Music Stars? I know why we don're hire Classical Music Stars (they've all been dead for hundreds years and are therefore less than desirable team members).

Amphibian.com comic for 22 June 2015

ANSI, the Other 8-Bit Art

Despite the fact that I have 2 full-size old-school arcade games in my house (Dig Dug and Burgertime) and I do enjoy Minecraft, I am not a huge fan of 8-bit art. Back in 1982 when Burgertime was new, big-pixel games were the only games. Now people draw their game art in that style that just because they like it. I think some of the new games drawn like that look really good, and I am really impressed with artists' abilities to work in that style. But it's just not my favorite game art style.

If you haven't heard, 8-bit art (and also music) refers to a style reminiscent of the video games played on 3rd-generation home consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System, and the Atari 7800. The term "8-bit" refers to the processors in those consoles. The number of bits became a selling point, and the different generations were identified by their bit number. The Super NES was a 16-bit console, the Nintendo 64 was a 64-bit, and so on.

So while I'm not a huge fan of 80's style video game artwork, I really love ANSI art. I used to make it for a BBS back in the 90's. I've seen some really amazing things rendered in just a few simple colors and an antique character set. And since all the characters used in ANSI drawings were expressed in only a single byte, I think that ANSI art is the forgotten 8-bit art.

I recently found an online tool that can convert your pictures into ANSI art. Below is one of my frog images rendered that way. I don't know if it will look right on all platforms (especially if you are reading this on a mobile device) but it looks ok to me in Chrome on Windows 7.


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Try it with some of your own pictures!

Amphibian.com comic for 17 October 2014