Thursday, April 23, 2009

Pixel Pushing

A while back I helped Act 3 design and build a videogame for the photographer Scott Smith's website. I did a bunch of "pixel" drawings of locations, characters, weapons, bikinis, etc. Here are some of 'em.It was a neat project and pretty different from most of my other work. The idea was to emulate the look 'n feel of old adventure games and their EGA graphics, like the early Sierra Online games. My middle-school years included a lot of Space Quest, Police Quest, and (of course) Leisure Suit Larry:It was fun turning real and semi-real people and places into pixelized versions of themselves:More challenging was designing all the games-within-the-game. This was was sort of a Frogger-style deal:For those interested in tech talk, all these drawings are 100% vector. I won't reveal any more of my secrets. Unless you ask me.This is an interstitial loading screen:This is the climactic photo-shoot, sketched then rendered:This was the celebratory duck-hunt afterwards:Anyway, if you've got a few minutes, you should go play the full game!

5 comments:

Grimalkin Press said...

awesome! I was thinking how much it reminded me of my sierra/lucas arts miss*spent parser interface youth and then I read lower and voila! :D cool stuff


*well

Covey said...

...and now for something completely different...

Anthony Woodward said...

Wow this is awesome. I just downloaded dosbox and started playing spacequest3 for the first time since it came out. I started thinking, wow this game is a playable comic!
I'd love to make my own some day.

Jay said...

This is really great! It's so different from the rest of your work, but I can still see your hand in it.

How is it vector? My only guess would be to create it as vector and rastorize it at a super low resolution?

Dan Z. said...

Thanks for checking it out everybody!

Jay: Yeah, there's an effect in AI where you can 'rasterize' at a real low dpi. The key is turning anti-aliasing off. The vectors are all still editable.