Who would have thought some wobble would add so much to the experience. This is wonderful and I don't think it would be half as good if it didn't wobble.
For those not wanting to click a link without explanation: It's "Juice it or lose it", a talk about how adding simple effects to a game can make it much more immersive and fun. It's well made and inspiring talk, breaking down how much can be done with so little. Worth a watch.
That's one of these ideas I wish I had come up with. It sounds fun to program, fun to use and even potentially useful to make cutesy gifs.
I wasn't familiar with PICO8, it seems to effectively be a faux-retro console emulator that you can use as a sandbox to build programs (that can then be exported to a web player, which is quite nifty): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico-8
It's $15 to be able to write programs for the platform, but you can export them to html5 to make available for others to play online for free. There's a pretty large library of such games hosted on pico-8's website.
There are some open-source alternatives like TIC-80 and PixelVision8. Personally, I'd only recommend them over pico-8 if $15 is a serious barrier or open source is an absolute must. They all have their various strengths and weaknesses, but pico-8 seems to be the best optimized for pure, unadulterated fun.
One downside of PICO-8's closed source is that it can't easily be ported to different architectures by fans, so you're limited to Windows, Linux (x86) and the Raspberry Pi (and HTML/JS, but just the player). There's no Android port.
TIC-80, on the other hand, runs more places (Android!). And someone has ported it to run on OpenDingux portable handhelds, there's a RetroArch core, etc.
That said, PICO-8 is super, super polished and absolutely worth the $15.
There is a pico8 emulator that lets you play games on some handheld console and I understand that an Android version is in development.
https://0xcafed00d.itch.io/tac08-rg350
I paid for Pico. Mostly to play games on rpi, not making them. Being closed source is still a drag since I'm used to being able to patch and adjust the things I use. That I can't is immediately felt.
Yeah and the alternatives like tic have pretty major setup problems on rpi.
In Celeste, there's an easter egg that lets you play the original PICO-8 game on an in-game computer. How was this accomplished, if porting it themselves isn't possible? Did they have to remake the entire game?
They might have built their own pico-8 runtime/emulator. Alternatively, porting the game to use another Lua runtime (like LÖVE) would probably not be that hard. Ex, here's a pico-8 runtime in LÖVE:
Oh to be clear it's not that that bothers me, it's the fact that it's closed source. That's just personal preference though.
I'd be fine with a "source available" paying solution for instance, as long as the terms of the license are reasonable. This way at least I know that if the project goes defunct I'm not stuck with apps that I can't easily run anywhere anymore. See all these Flash games that nobody can easily play anymore.
An example of software that works that way is SQLite: they sell extensions as source code with a perpetual (non-open-source) license.
Yep, slightly under the cost of two decent brews for hours of fun. Lua is easy to learn, there is a ton of Pico-8 info. Give a search for the Pico-8zine, a ton of tips and great ideas. Pico-8 has been talked about here and Hackaday.
On the other hand, being closed source help getting the "community" feel where people discover some quirk and secret features of a strange and not-totally documented device.
That said, I hope it become open-source when every secrets have been discovered.
This is genius. It's one of those things that is sooooo simple but soooo good. The wobble makes even the crappiest little sketch come to life. I think that's what's so awesome about it.
I think this is drawing on the vibe from animation styles where the artist draws several of the same frame, and minor imperfections are seen across each. (Dr. Katz etc seem to similarly be trying to mimic this.) A good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53s5uln_bw4
The question though is why does this look so appealing? I guess it's probably because in general we see motion as a proxy for if something is alive, since things that are alive are never completely still.
> (Dr. Katz etc seem to similarly be trying to mimic this.)
Fun fact: Tom Snyder (of Dr. Katz fame) invented and patented the technique, called "Squigglevision".
"Squigglevision is a patented method of computer animation in which the outlines of shapes are made to wiggle and undulate, emulating the effect of sketchily hand-drawn animation. Tom Snyder of Tom Snyder Productions invented the technique, which his animation studio Soup2Nuts subsequently used in Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, Dick and Paula Celebrity Special, Home Movies, O'Grady, and Science Court." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squigglevision
You can read the GP's post, but you were not able to read the text in the TFA?
"Instructions
CTRL-Z, CTRL-Y (or S,F) to undo/redo
CTRL-C, CTRL-V to copy and paste between doodles
W,R to switch between doodles (or use the menu buttons)
TAB to toggle menu
Mouse wheel (or e,d) to change brush size
RMB to pick up a colour
RMB in menu colour palette to select secondary colour (used for patterns)
LMB+RMB in menu colour palette to set the background colour
To save all doodles, use the cartridge icon button in the pull-down menu.
Wobblepaint saves data to itself. To start a new wobble cart, type LOAD #WOBBLEPAINT from inside PICO-8 and then save it as something. The data storage is reasonably efficient so you can get around 20~100 doodles to a cart depending on complexity.
To save a gif to desktop, use the gif button to record a second of looping wobble. If you want to record multiple doodles (e.g. for an animation or story), press tab to hide menu, CTRL-8 to start a gif, W,R to flip through the doodles, and then CTRL-9 to save the gif."
They even go into details on how to use a game controller.
Remind's me of the SNES game "Yoshi's Island". That game used wobbly crayon for a lot of graphics, including goal UI: https://youtu.be/qZwjQu4lQm8?t=1341
Hmm, when you said that I thought of Kirby's Epic Yarn on the wii, where everything is made of yarn. It's ~ 10 years old, so more nostalgia than retro.
Just a heads up, the viewport scrolls in Firefox on Android while you're painting. Everything still works otherwise, but it makes it hard to draw because the canvas is moving with your finger. I'm guessing it has something to do with the URL bar changing the viewport height because the extra space seems to be roughly the same vertical height.
Awesome work by the way, it's a lot of fun to play with.
I suspect the draw tools simultaneously draw to 2-4 different canvases, with the input coordinate transformed for each, and the display cycles between them.
Just transforming the canvas itself can't explain how it works with patterned paints.
