simple messy basic sprite based font

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 18:13:20 UTC

simple messy basic font sprite

by _discovery

[Click to Play]

Press the up/down arrow keys

As the title states!

This isn't optimized at all, an exercise for the reader.
I drew the letters myself, as sprites, hence their existence in
the sprite sheet. Those are so you can swap either/or, and trade
sprites for code space and performance.
Have fun!

I threw the file on github as well

p.s The CC license isn't really applicable but I wasn't sure if NOT selecting it would imply you can't use it at all and now I can't edit that out it seems. The github repo has it as MIT license - you can do whatever you want with this!

Color Palette Analysis

Mon, 06 Jul 2015 00:37:04 UTC

db-pico 1.0

by _discovery

[Click to Play]

Hello fellow pico-8-ers!

I was tinkering with this wonderful thing, it's magical.
My only minor curiosity so far is the palette color choices - not so much the limitations (I LOVE that part of the entire point so very much) but the specific color values that were chosen.

I'd be curious to hear:

info and opinions on the existing palette
your user experience dealing with the provided palette in practice, like the low/mid/high and shades you can make with it for example.
and for the devs: if it will remain fixed, or if the color values may potentially be modified in future, perhaps hardcoded into the file somehow so it's still fixed, just configurable. I understand if that's beyond the goals.

Palette exploring

In my travels and exploration of various well known palettes I found that one I quite like to be a relatively close fit for the pico-8 colors, barring one index, and some value/saturation. This one from DawnBringer I quite liked, especially the presentation of it's applicability in use cases.

So, I ported the DawnBringer presentation/image to the pico-8 palette, out of curiousity, modifying the color indices to match the pico-8 values and see how it translated.

Here is the original for reference, if you don't know of it:

From this thread:
http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=12795

After originally editing the color palette directly, where the image would show the incorrect graphs, I was informed on twitter and in the comments the analysis tool that DawnBringer used was scripted for grafx2 and is available.

I reworked the image now, it uses the pico-8 analysis from DawnBringer's tools directly. So now all values displayed align with the pico-8 palette properly, and the graphs should be more useful. Thanks to baboum for posting a version in the comments as well, from the tools.

old version (1.0)

I'd love to hear your feedback on thoughts, as I'm no pixel palette master and would appreciate any and all input.

The cartridge!

Finally, I took that palette reference and created a cartridge with the sprites and reference nodes encoded in the spritesheet and map, and wrote up a simple display in a single screen for users to tinker with too. I'd pick a better name if needed, it's just a quick work up!

Here's what it looks like:

Here's the link to the source files:

https://github.com/underscorediscovery/db-pico

You can also ping me on twitter, http://twitter.com/___discovery

_discovery [Lexaloffle Blog Feed]

simple messy basic sprite based font

Color Palette Analysis