Pixel Art

Something I am starting to realise is that pixel art is hard and animated pixel art is even harder. Not just hard, but extremely time consuming too. To give you an idea of how much work goes into these things, take a close look at the forward-facing frames for our protagonist ...

I'm telling you, the guys who did Metal Slug should get some kind of medal.

Pygame Update

I recently realised that I haven't blogged about my Python/Pygame efforts in quite a while, so I figured it was time for an update. The good news is, my lack of blogging is not reflected by a lack of development, so there's quite a few new features - so many, in fact, that it's probably best if I just post a video ...

So here we can see a couple of maps designed with my very own level editor, an animated main character, a scrolling background, the ability to seamlessly walk off one map and onto another, animated features (eg. flames), pickups (eg. coins) and movement correction (ie. note the way the little fella 'slides' off obstacles that are blocking his way).

If anyone's interested, I created this video by running gtk-recordMyDesktop against the Pygame window and converting the resulting .ogg with mencoder:

mencoder out.ogg -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts abitrate=160 -o rpg-world.avi

I have no idea what most of that means, but the quality has turned out okay!

Groovy comes to Google App Engine

It would seem that my reservations about Google App Engine may soon be no more. I haven't had chance to try it yet, but Google App Engine now supports Java!

Better still (for fans of Groovy like myself) work has been going on behind the scenes to ensure that Groovy is also supported - see here and here. In fact, Guillaume Laforge (creator/inventor of Groovy) has already written a Google Maps / Flickr mashup with it.

:-D