You, and me, and the HTML5 canvas, pixel art, and quest logs
As we start to round out the summer I haven’t been reading as much, so I don’t have much to report on that front, but I have been keeping busy!
I made yet another pixel art drawing tool, pixel pixel pixel pixel pixel pixel allows folks to draw chonky pixel art creations on pretty much any sized canvas. This was fun to make. I’ve spent so much time with the HTML5 canvas lately that I’m really starting to feel like I get it, which is a fun realization! If you draw anything with pixel I’d love to see what you make!
Having made a fancy little menagerie of web things lately, I’ve been wondering if I can do anything more to unify their aesthetic — I have some subtle and secret rules that I use when designing them to help keep things consistent, but that is more to save me from having to make choices than it is to make them all feel related.
…but also, why would I need them to feel related when they almost all already live at the same URL?
My family recently started to play a game called SCHiM — I’ve been watching, mostly, and I’m really struck by it. A few things I am appreciating about the game:
- it includes an accessibility setting to increase the contrast
- the sound design is gorgeous, and supports the visual aesthetic. A lot of the world building and wayfinding is audio-driven
- there’s a totally subtle, yet effective mechanism for helping you to find your next waypoint, like a nonverbal/textual hint system
That sort of quest log stuff has really been on my mind; after noticing how good the quest log is in Arranger in a previous post, being forever struck by how bad the Pokémon games handle this, and picking up Dragon Quest VI on the Gameboy after like…an eon? a millennium? a full epoch? away and being able to slip right back in I decided to make my own quest log…which isn’t in any way a todo list. I’ve been using it at work.
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