A couple of weeks ago Jürgen Sachau asked me if he could use my micro dudes for the cover of his Boings & Tickles EP. A great honor of course so I agreed and made a nice design for him as well. Here is the result:
front / back (click for full-size on flickr)
You can listen to (and download) the EP here: http://www.ektoplazm.com/free-music/outolintu-boings-tickles/
justGREAT! I start off designing some tiles just for practice and one day later I end up with a neat experiment 
I was inspired by the graphics of Dofus Arena and decided to try and create some similar tiles… Spending half a day fooling around with Fireworks I ended up with this image:
Another half a day later I turned the graphics into an animated terrain generator: http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080302.htm
The terrain is generated according to three small bitmaps (see top left corner). The first one determines the type of the tile. The second one is like a bumpmap and determines the elevation of eacht tile. The third bitmap determines where objects (plants, rocks, gold, etc.) should be placed.
In the future I might create an editor which can write the bitmaps.
Once I designed more versions of each tile-type (4 or 5 different grass tiles for example) the generator will be able to pick a random version of that tile. This way repetition in the structure should be avoided (at the moment the tiles are just mirrored at random).
This week I made some designs for my Mahjong game (read more) and the game is gonna be just great! Here is a little preview of the tiles and the style of the game (I’ll upload more designs later on):
Besides the designs I also needed a nice transition between the background and a map that will be shown somewhere during the game (as some sort of level selection). Because the style is kind of “old” I thought it would be a good idea to make some sort of dissolve transition.
Whaddayaknow; I managed to get a decent result in just a couple of hours.
Despite the fact that I used a perlinNoise and a copyChannel the result runs pretty smooth. Check it out:
http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080201.htm
To accomplish the dissolve effect I used an alpha mask on the top image (in this case the “map”-image). The mask itself is created by combining a perlinNoise and copyChannel. The perlinNoise creates the randomness and the copyChannel transforms the randomness into a transparent layer.
The size of the mask is half the size of the image and stretched to match the size of the image. This way only a small perlin noise has to be created which increases performance.
Just great; a new week and I have only one spare evening do a little experimenting 
Since my goal was to put up at least one decent experiment a week and since I have little time this week, I decided to upload an experiment that’s almost a year old. It’s an engine for a Mahjong game:
http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp061203.htm
At the time I made the engine I didn’t feel like creating nice graphics so the experiment still looks a bit boring.
Because the engine works fine I thought it would be a wast not to use it, so tonight I created some graphics for the tiles (check them here).
The symbols are taken from a photo of real Mahjong stones. so they should be quite accurate.
The tileset is not 100% complete yet and the current tiles still need a little work on the coloring as well, but I’m sure I’ll finish it somewhere next year
MADinSPAIN was justGREAT!
The 3-day trip with the TFE-design team to Madrid was a big success. There were lots of inspiring speakers, but the ones that really stood out and inspired me the most (on all kinds of levels) were AllOfUs, Group94, Pleix and de-construct (in random order):
AllOfUs:
A really cool agency that showed some amazing mobile phone apps and interactive installations. They really gave me the inspiration to create new experiments (if only they could give me some more time as well).
site: http://www.allofus.org/
Group94:
I was already familiar with their amazing work, but it was really nice to see how they handle their projects and how they solved some complicated Flash problems with really simple solutions. The most surprising thing about Group94 is that they work with only 8 people and yet manage to create so much fantastic products.
site: http://www.group94.com/
old site: http://www.group94.com/home_old.php
Pleix:
A group of freelancers with various disciplines who join together to create cool commercials, music videos and non-commercial films.
site: http://www.pleix.net/
de-construct:
A webdesign agency who have a great vision towards user experience on their websites. A nice example of this is a site they made for Panasonic:
http://lumixdifference.archive.de-construct.com/
The three cameras that are exposed on the site are presented in a short story. Each camera has it’s own story in which it’s characteristics are displayed. This way the user is not directly confronted with all kind of specs (which he has to compare to find the right camera), but he can simply select a camera by a specific purpose. A very nice approach towards potential customers if you ask me.
site: http://www.de-construct.com/
Of course there were a lot of other interesting speakers but for now I’ll leave this post to these four agencies because I need my time to work out my newborn ideas.
Stay tuned….
PS: drop a line to the guys of DoubleYou:
http://www.doubleyouhi.com/
