I don't have access to OS X right now, but I remember GIFfun being pretty good.

I'm a primitive caveman.

MSpaint.
Microsoft GIF animator.
 

Is there any other software that lets you resize the canvas without typing in numbers? That's pretty much the only reason I use Paint. MS GIF Animator is really easy to use, but it's inefficient at times, so I'm open to alternatives. *downloads mtPaint*

- Andy Goldsworthy

He's awesome, but given that his work is so...natural...I just don't know how possible it would be to do Goldsworthy stuff in a game.  Maybe in some sort of psudo real VR with accurate nature you could, but yeah, that's a long way off.

It wouldn't have to replicate nature. The idea behind his work is to bring out the existing beauty in that which is already there. It just happens that nature is there. Any kind of system that makes random polygons has potential, but refining the randomizing algorithm to make varied shapes could be a challenge.

Initial reactions:

Mark Rothko's stuff seems hard to translate into objects, and games are all about objects (usually). It seems like it would be easier to translate the intent behind the work--to make the games that children would make, or the games that children make up. Here's a multiplayer game in which I always win because I have the best character. Here's a game that's just like my school, except I'm allowed to climb the trees. Of course, it's harder to extract the thoughts from the children of the age he compares himself to. But you could argue that many games involves initial exploration of the environment, and that any game without a tutorial is similar to Mark Rothko's stuff in intent.

It would be a fun programming challenge to animate the curvature Tom of Finland's stuff has. I don't think frame-by-frame animations would convey the style enough--some combination of ragdoll physics and fluid dynamics might work.

Yves Klein doesn't really have a distinct visual style aside from blue, but You Have To Burn The Rope is similar in intent--it's the shell of a game, without much of a game in it. If he had access to a computer, I'm sure he would have taken out the innards and painted it blue.

I would love an Andy Goldsworthy game! Just give me a procedural environment and I'll spend hours placing the objects.

I can't find enough information on Jordan McKenzie to form an opinion.

Facial hair
 

I love the sprite rotation of the dude.

I just got parameter export mostly working for my thing which is similar to Sparky's thing! The idea is that you can adjust parameters, place blocks, get a simple clone of a platformer made Pretty Quickly, and share it. Since this lovely forum is the target market, import and export is done with copy/paste. So you can copy something that looks like this:

/==CAVE STORY==\
Here's the first room in Cave Story!
You can't do much, but I got the
physics down.

Acceleration: 1.1447524465620518
Speed Limit: 5.0000000000000000
Friction: 0.6685891449451447           <- the description is a lie; these aren't actually Cave Story's parameters.
Jumping Speed: 5.8518781475722790
Gravity: 0.7856245355214924
Terminal Velocity (this one gets changed every time Block Height and Width gets changed, because science): 17.0000000000000000
Protagonist's Width: 7.0000000000000000
Protagonist's Height: 12.0000000000000000
Block Height and Width (they have to be square): 17.0000000000000000
Horizontal Blocks Onscreen: 10.0000000000000000
Zoom Level: 1
FPS: 30

Start of Room
8888888888888888888888888888888
8888888888888888888888888888888
88  88 88 8 8   888888888888888
8 888 8 8 8 8 88888888888888888
8 888   8 8 8  8888888888888888 <- rooms will look something like this,
8 888 8 8 8 8 88888888888888888    with 8s representing blocks and spaces
88  8 8 88 88   888888888888888    representing spaces, but this is the
8888888888888888888888888888888    part that doesn't quite work yet
End of Room
\==CAVE STORY==/

And paste it to get something that looks like this:



Edit: This is a link to the screenshots on the previous page! Sorry for being misleading.

I've been thinking about making a toy for playing with platformer feel in real time. The idea is that you can run around in a test environment, and there are some text fields for variables like gravity and friction, so you can edit the values while playing.

:D Me too! Is that Flash? I've been using Game Maker.

Some artists' styles are heavily influential in videogames. Like Giger, Escher, Seurat, and Roger Dean. Others, I think, can never influence videogames. (Perhaps I am issuing a challenge?)

Examples (do your own damn googling if you don't know the names):

- Mark Rothko

- Tom of Finland

- Yves Klein

- Dan Flavin (not all minimalists are ruled out though - Qix is just a Mondrian painting, after all)

- Andy Goldsworthy

- Jordan McKenzie

(I'll contribute to the discussion as soon as I get a few things off my plate! I am in favor of this topic of conversation.)

How about we have deep, meaningful discussions about game design without arbitrarily restricting vocabulary? I think omitting "fun" is more of an end than a means. If we talk about games on a deep enough level, I think we'll end up refraining from using "fun" anyway because it doesn't contribute much to the conversation. It's a useful word when discussing things generally, a less useful word when discussing things more specifically (sometimes (maybe)).

My first "game" was an experiment with sprites and animation more than anything else. You were a green dude with antennae that glowed, with little green dots rotating around the tips to show that they were glowing. You could transform into a ball (by pulling your limbs into your body), and when you moved as a ball, there were animated lines around you that made you look like a meteor. If you moved into the room to the right, you ended up floating in space, where there were a bunch of wormholes. Touching one caused a swirly-rotating animation and transported you to a random point on the screen. Two rooms to the left of that was a hockey rink, where you were the puck, except that you were the ball, and you tried to score in the top goal despite the hockey players trying to shoot you into the bottom goal. It was in this room that I learned to hate physics and AI!

Man, I need to figure out how to access the data on that old hard drive.

I'm working on the programming behind these:

:D That was fantastic.

I think a score would detract from it.

Internet cookie for anyone to who figures out the inspiration. This may or may not turn into a game..

http://xkcd.com/104/

(To conform to the thread, here's a run cycle I haven't finished. There will be two legs eventually!)

a dead baby A hardcore house, whatever that entails.

Initially, I was expecting this to be a thread about interface design.  Ah well.

Me too.

If it's a menu, are there going to be menu items on it? We can't really assess the aesthetic value if the whole thing isn't there.

The composition does look scattered, but that might not be the case if buttons happen.

Start off with really quick and dirty sprites like the above. Keep programming until something about a sprite really bothers you (for instance, that the outline of the villain above is broken at the edges or that the block lend themselves to poor collision). Then fix that part. While you're in the pixel editor, mess around with it--give the blue guy an awesome top hat, even if the rest of him isn't awesome enough to match. Add a gradient to the block. That way you'll actually learn the practice, rather than leaving in the placeholders because they're good enough.

That's what I did, and look at me now! I'm a world-famous lexicographer with my own private submarine.

Yeah, that's the downside of having an odd number of pixels horizontally. The alternatives would be to have the triangles tilted a bit or to pick a different approximation of sqrt(3)/2 (the ones I used are 13/15 and 7/8).

I'm running out of things to pixel. Does anyone have any suggestions/requests?

Another tip: It doesn't matter if you accidentally use the fill tool on the grid! You can just ignore it and drag more grid over the broken one when it becomes a problem.

Also, <3 copy/paste.