i don’t entirely remember how these happened. my slut and i were talking about themes for the coming week of her mp3 club – each week she announces a theme and people contribute songs. at the end of the week everyone gets to hear the songs. this week’s theme isn’t nasty booty, so i’m not sure how it came up.
what i do know is that when i heard the term “nasty booty” i had to make ansi art of it. that’s text-mode art: a mosaic not of single-color pixels but of 8×16 pixel characters. i’m drawn to the form because it’s tricky: each character can only contain two colors – a foreground and a background – out of a set of sixteen. but wait, only half of those colors can be used as the background color.
i also do my ansi art in the eighteen-year-old text-mode game creation kit zzt – it’s the most convenient way to do this kind of work that i’ve found, though it has its own set of difficulties: it doesn’t generate most of these color combinations “out of the box.” game elements of the right colors need to be snatched from hacked game files. and most of the characters in the ascii set are only accessible to one type of scripted game object, only a certain amount of which are allowed to coexist on a single screen. which means that even pictures as simple as these needed to be done in pieces and stitched together later in an image-editing program.
it’s still the best way i know to get results like these. maybe it’s just because i’m so used to zzt’s editor to begin with.
i posted earlier versions of these on my twitpic last night. other ascii art on my twitpic: my new business card – the design and the finished card. also: logos for glorious trainwrecks’ massively multiplayer online zzt project, marmots.
13 comments
I like that a lot!
that is pretty badass
INSANE! and cool
That second one is awesome.
Little bit of crit about your business card: While the old one specifies you as a ‘game designer and critic’, the new one calls you a ‘Dot Matrix Dominatrix, and for all intents and purposes looks like a dominatrix’s business card. Fine if you’re actually looking for work as a videogame-themed domme, but confusing to any other client.
I like calling the internet ‘tubes’, though!
it’s two-sided, and one side lists my title as “game designer.”
i used “tubes” because it’s five characters, meaning it lines up square with “email” and “phone.” christopher also suggested “site,” “mail” and “cell.”
the second one is awesome.
that business card is… striking. kudos if you actually manage to get work with it.
i’ll be striking you, glossy labia
Have you ever tried MegaZeux? It’s similar to ZZT, but it lets you use a larger palette (which can be completely redefined to your taste), and it’s much less limited as far as how many objects can be onscreen at once. Also, the character set itself can be completely redesigned if you want. Back when I did ANSI art regularly, it was always my preferred program. Awesome job on the art, by the way.
i like the limited palette and character set of zzt because it means you don’t need to draw any graphics or otherwise create any outside assets for your game: everything that will be in your game is already in front of you.
i’ve taken to calling megazeux “zzt for demosceners” because people generally seem to be more interested in coercing megazeux into doing showy, fancy things than in creating finished games, which is why the vast majority of megazeux games i’ve encountered are demos.
Fair enough, and I’ll freely admit that I never made an actual *game* with MZX myself, mainly because I spent too much time screwing around in the editor to find new shiny things it could do. I’m a bit surprised to hear that anyone is still making games (well, demos at least) for it. The only Megazeux community I’m aware of basically imploded around the start of the decade, and I haven’t heard anything about the program since.
Nice! You’re pretty good with pixels, but it’s nice to see some stylish ansi graphics as well. Ansi art has a special place in the hearts of many geeks, including myself.
Have you ever made a game in ZZT?
Someone on the Z2 message boards posted a link to this site, that’s how I discovered your blog! =)
i made this a while ago. zzt’s turning twenty in a couple years, and i have a game in my head i would like to make for the occasion.
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