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About this blog

Mostly Atari-related projects, and other ramblings. Home of the Artie the Atari comic strip.

Entries in this blog

Back to Atari!

Well after getting sidetracked with animation for a few entries, it's back to some more on-topic stuff.Animation!...of Atari 2600 game sprites, that is. ;)I just sent off the first batch of exploding sprites to Manuel for Colony 7. I couldn't make huge, elaborate explosions due to the constraints, but I think what I came up with gets across the idea of stuff blowing apart pretty well.I'll also be working on some sprites for Chris' version of Juno First. This was a cool game I discovered while wr
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8

Wait a minute... I was right?

Well, I wasn't exactly "right" about Disney buying Pixar, since I thought that it was an outside long shot at best: But essentially, that's what happened today. I think someone's gonna owe me a steak. (Hi Frank!) As I mentioned in my previous blog entry about this, I figured the only way Pixar would make this deal is if they took over creative control of Disney Feature Animation, and much to my surprise, Disney agreed to pretty much that.According to the press release: Now exactly what
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Sure... and Sony will buy Apple, too.

So the big brouhaha in the animation industry over the last couple of days is the age-old rumor of Disney planning to buy Pixar.   As far as I've been able to tell, all of the articles have been based around one article which originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal. What's interesting to me about all of this, is how all of these other "news" services seem to be treating this as fact. The buyout is practically a done-deal by their accounts. Although at the end of most articles, most are
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2

Trailer trash

I seldom go to movies anymore, mainly because they're too expensive. For the price of admission and snacks, I could buy it on DVD instead.   While on vacation though, I managed to get out and see The Chronicles of Narnia, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I hadn't read the book, but I've been told the movie follows it pretty faithfully. And although it may not be among my all-time-favorite movies, I'd certainly put it in the "very enjoyable diversion" category, which is a pretty good recommendatio
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The most useless blog entry - ever!

Well, after being on vacation for a few weeks, it's about time to dust off the blog and start updating it again.   However, this isn't that update.   But I'll have something in here soon.   I'll post some opinions on the Flashback 2, write up a way-too-in-depth look at why the XBox 360 is going to lose out to the PS3, maybe add some thoughts about Apple's move to Intel, and also start up another "how-to" series - this one being about creating animated sprites for the 2600.   Meanwhile, t
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Why Pixar doesn't have anything to worry about...

…maybe. So, a friend of mine who worked on Chicken Little recently invited me to a screening of it at the El Capitan theater in Hollywood, in 3D, for members of the visual effects industry. I should point out that he left Disney a year-and-a-half ago. He’s feeling much better now. While the theater was mostly full, there were maybe six or eight kids in the theater. The rest were all adults. I think this tended to result in a more “honest” reaction to the film. If the place was packed with ki
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2

Christmastime!

Reindeer Rescue Wrap-upWell, it looks like Bob is done programming Reindeer Rescue. I think the game turned out great, and people are gonna love it! It's already climbed up to the fourth best-selling homebrew of all-time in the AtariAge store. That's pretty amazing! (The fact that it can be had for free may have had a little to do with that... nah. )It was a lot of fun creating the sprites and other in-game graphics for it. I want to thank Bob for inviting me to be part of the project, and givi
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They do chicken... right?

So I grabbed dinner at Kentucky Fried Chicken tonight.   Yeah, I know. But I still eat there. (And I actually worked there once!)   Anyway... here's the thing that puzzles me.   All they make... is chicken. That's their whole thing, right?   And yet... it seems about half the time I go there... they are out of chicken!   "Sorry, we don't have any Original™. Would you like Extra Crispy™ instead?" "Sorry, we don't have any white meat. Would you like dark meat instead?" "Sorry, we're ou
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15

So many pixels...

I had a really nice Thanksgiving at my relatives' house. It's always nice to get away for a few days. Ate way too much turkey and mashed potatoes.And pie.Gotta have the pie, though.Anyway, I brought along an iBook and a Wacom tablet, so I could work on some more game sprites while I was down there.So far, I've done almost 50 sprites.For one game.Including the individual frames for animation I'm up to 151.Plus 30 font characters.That's a lot of pixels.Not all of it is going to get used. A few are
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Making Labels - Part 7

Part 7 - Effects   At this point, the Solar Plexus label is pretty much done. Except it's still not bathed in that red glow that I wanted. We'll get to that in a minute.   Advanced Masking   First, I want to backtrack a little bit, and cover QuickMask.   Selecting and masking areas off is one of the keys to working in Photoshop. QuickMask is an advanced method for creating masks that greatly expands what the Magic Wand is capable of.   You enter or exit QuickMask with the q key. There
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Making Labels - Part 6

Well, since there's now a label contest for Strat-O-Gems underway, I suppose I should wrap up this tutorial, just in case people can make some use of it.   Part 6 - Highlighting   Highlighting is part of the shading process. You're defining a light source, and then using that to apply light and dark values to an object. I make highlighting a separate step, just because it's a more flexible way to work. By putting highlights on a separate layer in Photoshop, it allows me to go back and adju
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Only 8 pixels wide

So... where was I?Well, I managed to wrap up the coloring on the Solar Plexus label. Jess posted a picture of it here.Still on my "to do" list is the last part (or two) of the label tutorial. I just need to make some time for it.The big project turned out to be the manual for the 2005 MiniGame MultiCart. Besides a tight deadline, it was like doing seven manuals in one, so it turned out to be quite a challenge to cram everything in there, without it turning into something the size of a phone book
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Making Labels - Part 5

Part 5 - Shading: Bonus Tutorial     How to chrome almost anything   I was taught some of this stuff by a guy who used to work at GM designing cars. He could crank out a rendering of a car in 30 seconds that was better than anything I could do in 30 minutes. It was pretty humbling, but I learned how to draw chrome.   Here's the thing to remember about chrome: it's just a surface that reflects everything around it.   So what you're really drawing is the environment the object is in. Not
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One down, umpteen to go!

I think the forums are slightly wonky. First, daylight savings time hasn't kicked in yet. And second, October gained an extra day:And even though this is going to throw the Trick-or-Treaters into a tailspin, I like it. I can always use an extra day here or there.Since I wasn't really able to do any more work on RPS or the MiniGame MultiCart (pending various approvals), I decided to finish up the Solar Plexus label. Now I just need to get the Photoshop file to Jess, and that project's all wrappe
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Let's look at this from a standpoint of status...

What do we have on the spacecraft that works? ;)The RPS Manual is nearly finished now. The only thing left to do is finish up the instructions on how to play, and list the game options.You'd think that would be most of the manual right there. But no. I wrote an introduction to the game, a "getting started" page, character descriptions, created new background illustrations for each page, re-formatted the label artwork to fit the cover, and then made the back cover.But that's all done now, so I'm
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Shifting priorities, with a "manual" transmission

Well, it turns out that not only am I designing the manual for RPS, it looks like I'll be writing it now, too. But that's cool, since I created new characters for the game, and I kind of relish the idea of writing their back-stories.So this moves it to the top of my "things to do" list, and I ended up getting a pretty decent first pass at the layout done last night. I haven't started any of the writing yet, since I wanted to see how much space I was going to end up with, but between some e-mails
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Making Labels - Part 4

Part 4 - Shading   I'm going to split shading into a couple of categories: Shading and Highlighting. They're actually both part of the rendering process, but the way I approach them in Photoshop is as separate steps.   The reason for this is flexibility. This goes back to the whole thing about splitting the Photoshop document up into layers. I can experiment a lot more by keeping them on different layers, and adjust them as needed.   First though, I'm going to sidetrack a little bit.    
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Making Labels - Part 3

Part 3 - More Coloring     Color Space   This is probably a good point to mention color space. A color space defines what primary colors are combined together, and how they're combined, in order to make a full range of colors.   RGB (red, green, blue) is what you see on your computer display.   CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) is what printers use. Technically, this image is only CMY. But it's a good comparison against RGB.   Printers can not print all of the colors that you c
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3

You can't erase dirt

I spent more time fixing the RPS label today. There's been an area of the drawing that's been bugging me all along, but it wasn't until I printed it out and actually drew on top of it with a pen that I figured out how to fix it. It ended up being a line that needed to be moved, and an area re-shaded a little bit. Then all of the sudden that area seemed to "snap" into place. I was also able to make a couple of other areas work better, so it was worth the effort.Sometimes you just have to see it i
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Weeks have "ends"?

Looks like I'm going to be keeping busy for awhile.In addition to working on the Solar Plexus artwork (which now has the shading done) and the accompanying tutorial (which is taking more time than the actual artwork), I've also got another couple of projects just handed to me:One is the manual for RPS. I haven't done a 2600 manual before, but my background was originally in graphic design, so I'm looking forward to it. I've got a couple of ideas for it I'd like to try, and it will be nice to hav
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Making Labels - Part 2

Last time we worked on the line art. Getting the line art cleaned up means that when you add color, you won't have to waste a lot of time working around smudges or broken lines. So with that done, it's time for...     Part 2 - Coloring   I use Photoshop for coloring almost everything, but many paint programs share some of the same features. There are a few key things that will make coloring much, much easier.     Layers   Using layers allows you to add color without affecting your line
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Making Labels - Part 1

When Jess Ragan asked for help in coloring his line art for his 2600 game Solar Plexus, I thought it would be a good opportunity to make a "how-to" for other people who want to create label artwork. Whenever there's a label contest at AtariAge, people invariably ask for tips on creating labels, so hopefully this will be of some help. So here we go...     Part 1 - Line Art   If you're going to draw your own label, that means you're going to end up with line art somewhere in the process. How
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Colony 7 Sprites

Okay, I think I have all of the sprites done for Colony 7. It took a little time to rip the ones from the original arcade game in MAME, but thanks to Snapz Pro X 2, I can capture movies of anything on my Mac. Then it's just a matter of taking the individual frames I need, and importing them into ImageReady, so I can see them as animation.Like this:(enlarged to 300%)The Advisor doesn't do much, does it? Although really, how much action can you expect from an Advisor?Those were pretty easy to capt
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27

What's this? A short blog entry?

A few quick things (well... quick to type them up anyway): The RPS label is done! Billy really liked the final artwork, and plans to get back to working on the game soon. As a side note, Billy also had me create some new sprites for the game. So I'm anxious to see how they work out. Speaking of sprites, the next 2600 project I need to work on are some sprites for Manuel's port of Colony 7. (Thought I forgot, didn't you Manuel?) After that, I'll be coloring Jess Ragan's artwork for
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It should look easy

Well, I think I'm nearly done with the RPS label. I sent a copy off to Billy to see what he thinks of it, so hopefully I'll know soon. There are just a handful of tweaks left to do at this point.I forget who said it, but there's a saying that goes something like, "Art is never really finished. But at some point you just have to put it down and walk away."I have no idea how many hours I've put into RPS, but I'm sure it's more than any other label I've done so far. By a wide margin.The irony is -
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