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[Corpus]

I used to do something like this in primary school

I'd take a pencil and start scribbling away on a page, then once it was filled with relatively loose scribbles I'd draw over the existing lines more thickly to pick out any characters or interesting-looking creatures that'd been formed by the random shapes.

[Super-Dot]

I just found this thing which I made a year ago:



I put the pixels on a layer below the canvas and traced them. I thought I made another one, but I can't find it.

[Inanimate]

Imagine a competition to create a game solely populated by sprites found in a single image created by that generator. Animating them would be fun!

I LOVE the sound of that!

[GregWS]

Alright guys, I'm official amazed!  Thanks Kelsey, this whole think fucking rocks! 

So, I decree that there must be a compo from this, pronto!  Also, we could pair it with a site that randomly generates harmonious colour palettes, and our entries would have to use characters (and terrain?) from the pixel generator and colour from the colour generator.

And even if we don't do that compo, I may just make a quick game that way anyway.

[AndyWiltshireBPA]

I'd take a pencil and start scribbling away on a page, then once it was filled with relatively loose scribbles I'd draw over the existing lines more thickly to pick out any characters or interesting-looking creatures that'd been formed by the random shapes.

Thats a brilliant way to create creatures/characters, I do the same thing sometimes.... scribble.. scribble... then discover the creature hidden within the scribble...

[Synnah]

So, I decree that there must be a compo from this, pronto!  Also, we could pair it with a site that randomly generates harmonious colour palettes, and our entries would have to use characters (and terrain?) from the pixel generator and colour from the colour generator.

And even if we don't do that compo, I may just make a quick game that way anyway.

I'd be down for this. Game Maker's been sitting on my desktop for all too long; it's about time I played around with it, and this would make spriting a whole lot quicker. Anybody know of any palette-generation sites, then? I'm not entirely sure Kelsey's generator would work so well for terrain. I've had a brief look online, and the only thing I've been able to find is this, which generates top-down cave maps. Not particularly useful!

At any rate, I think Kelsey should make a game about a bipedal elephant with a koala on its back.

[Robson]

[TooMuchSpareTime]

Haha those are amazing. This is like those Rorschach/inkblot tests!

I can't tell whether the ghost is resting against the block or pushing it.

Rotate this one 90 degrees clockwise and ---- Well, Sigmund Freud would have something to say about what I see. 


Also, I can't load anything on the site except the background and a "red x". Do I need to install something for my browser first?

[Anthony Flack]

My brain does this with random patterns in linoleum. I can't stop it.

One of Richard Dawkins' books (which one? Dammit!) has a nifty little program he developed that generates little creatures. It's vector-based rather than pixel-based, but you could easily modify it to different purposes. The key is that it's recursive - the program generates a bunch of similar models, and you choose the one you like best, and then it generates a bunch of variations on that, and so on.

He wanted to demonstrate how evolutionary principles can generate complex designs, and it does that very nicely. In the book he has examples where he picked whichever shape looked most like a face, or most like an aeroplane, or whatever, and within a few generations the shapes being generated did indeed look that way.

I've always wanted to have a try implementing something like this. I wonder if there's a version of it online?

[Anthony Flack]

[googles]

The book was The Blind Watchmaker, the thingies were called biomorphs, and here's a software page: http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Software/software.shtml

[Anthony Flack]

This one looks good:
http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~sipper/biomorphs/evolution.html

[ThetaGames]

[ChevyRay]

These are excellent! Wonderful idea :D

[Super-Dot]

This is pretty awesome, guys!

Also, I can't load anything on the site except the background and a "red x". Do I need to install something for my browser first?

The page relies on on data: URLs, which IE 7 and below don't support. Pick one of these.

These are sweet 


The cheerful elderly reptile agrees that a compo would be swell. Should it be to create a game, or just to find a neat picture, or to find and animate a neat picture, or what?


Also, goose!

[GregWS]

I think the compo should be to make a short (under 5 minute) game based off characters (and possibly terrain) obtained from 1 random image.  And like I'd suggested before, we could allow a random harmonious colour palette generator to be used for colour palette; leaving things black and white could work just as well to.

[whitespace]

I wonder if this works with music too,
I like the idea of procedurally generated music
but most of the works don't produce emotional response
in me. Maybe if the good parts in a random sequence
are handpicked ....

[Cymon]

Has anyone ever stared at ceiling tiles or randomish patterns of floor tiles and played this game. Used to have a bathroom that was good for this.

[whitespace]

Has anyone ever stared at ceiling tiles or randomish patterns of floor tiles and played this game. Used to have a bathroom that was good for this.

I think it's human nature to search patterns in, what at first sight looks like, random behaviour. Some of us are maybe more interested and look for it everywhere, but everyone I think has looked at the clouds in the sky and discovered what their fantasy brought up.

pareidolia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

apophenia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

[BMcC]

There are some mind-numbingly wonderful links in this thread.  I want to use this for... something!

[Synnah]

Okay, I found a couple of palette generators.

http://nine.frenchboys.net/palette.php
This one will generate 5 random colours. You could perhaps use these as the base colours for your palette, and then add a lighter and a darker version for highlight and shadow, along with black and white.

http://defmech.com/color/
This one is much closer to our needs, as it will create a palette of 9 harmonious colours. It only generates two distinct colours, with highlight and shadow, and three shades of grey, so it may be a little limiting to create a whole game using just those. Still, that could be part of the charm!

Now we just need a good method for generating tilesets, and optionally some kind of generative music; I know that a few guys on here have experimented with the latter before.