Full Time Pixie @elfi@pixie.town

It happened again, I shared some links from around the web of interesting things I found or remembered I'd previously bookmarked this week: https://britthub.co.uk/interesting-things-this-week/

Themes this week are affordable software, finding and making images without the use of AI, drawing animals and maths.

today's software preservation task

one of the great crimes of the 21st century was that Mark Jones' (Core Design) Darkmere - an isometric adventure-RPG for the amiga - was poorly visually documented by the usual places like lemonamiga/mobygames/etc.

perhaps for that reason alone, few remember just how incredible mark's pixel work is. using a tightly compressed palette of 16 colours for title screens and 32 colours in-game, he produces some of the best-lit scenes i have ever seen. all hand-dithered, no less.

it's one thing to paint beautiful pixel art stills for circulating on social media; it's entirely another to build them as modular assets to be used in a game. mark's ability to tackle both jobs is a masterwork.

thankfully, mark is his own best archivist, and kept a treasure trove of screenshots from the project. he provides an extensive commentary on the creation of each sprite/tile and the overall style of the game, as well as his memories of designing and building it.

(daggerfall fanatics may recognize some of the assets - trees and mushrooms - re-used in that game!)

read his entire writeup on Darkmere here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20171104143619fw_/http://www.mjonesgraphics.com/darkmere.html

#amiga #pixelArt #retroGaming

6 DAYS LEFT to pre-order my "Cats in Weird Places" calendar. These are the pages for September-December. https://www.djamilaknopf.com/store #Illustration #Animals #CatArt #SliceOfLife