Drawing 169 micro dudes pixel-by-pixel is just great fun! Here is the result:
13×13 dudes, 13×13 pixels each – pixel – fireworks | download
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).
Did some pixel art again in a long time and the result turned out just great (if I say so myself). These are actually my first finished pixel scenes ever…
owl on branch – pixel – fireworks | download
fishtank – pixel – fireworks | download
(Click download for a better view)
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.