images, words, games, and other digital art. she / they. please support my work on patreon: patreon.com/vacuumflowers
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in case anyone missed it: the Hole Digging Game 1.0.1 is now out! it's a slow, gentle, goalless game intended to invite curiosity and reflection, featuring procedurally generated visuals + sound.
as of today, there's a mac version thanks to @sh0vemedia! lorenschmidt.itch.io/dig
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announcement thread!
my next project is a gardening game
🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱
with a surreal fantasy setting,
🌌🌌☄☄
programmable magitech robots,
✨💻💻✨
an emphasis on ecology,
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and existential horror components.
🕳🕳🚪🕳
working title, "nectar thief"
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some of the original notes on Conway's game of life, written out on a typewriter. they are so beautiful and endearing.
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this is huge. planned obsolescence is one of the biggest ecological problems incentivized by capitalism. i hope this has the legal teeth it needs to accomplish its goals. retaildetail.eu/en/news/elek…
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i was looking at more ergonomic keyboard layouts and learned that there is a way to graph the differences which uses hands with variable finger length.
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this is so iconic. it's perfectly representative of Microsoft's ethos. i wonder how much this terrible circle costs.
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playing AAA games as a small scale game creator is so wild. on the one hand, the design language is completely familiar. but then every time i walk around a corner there are like $20,000 worth of plant models or like tiny perfectly made bottles or something.
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hello, my name is Loren Schmidt, and i am currently working on a beautifully detailed and unconventional game in the vein of metroid / castlevania.
i'm currently struggling with financial stability. please consider supporting me or spreading the word.
patreon.com/vacuumflowers
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making free fit tiling patterns by drawing seamlessly across a grid of randomly oriented tiles
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i just noticed something about vampire myths: all of the folkloric vulnerabilities- direct sunlight, silver, alliums, are all antimicrobial.
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hydlide 3 (1989), NES. these three screenshots evoke such a strange, dreamlike, vivid world. these dreamlike colors and choppy sprite work are incredible.
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announcement:
here is a new open source alternative to perlin noise: octavia noise
it is a lightweight fractal noise algorithm. it is generalizable to n dimensions. it is not based on gridded points, and does not exhibit linear artifacts.
(link in second post)
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real time point lights with a continuous indirect lighting solver. this does one indirect bounce per frame @60hz, and these converge on the infinite bounce solution (it gets pretty close after 10 bounces or so)
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0.5% of shooters are trans, and 0.5% of the USA is trans.
this means there is not a significant correlation between being trans and carrying out mass shootings. anyone saying otherwise is lying to you.
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i thought i would do some ossuary tiles and got a little carried away and did 7 skull variants
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a typo when turning off my overdraw test resulted in this lovely transparent effect.
(it's doing += for the r channel, but = for g and b)
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i've been playing Armored Core 1. as with many games i play, this is both as research and recreation. or maybe the two aren't separate. research is fun. this a game i've settled into more deeply than many.
i thought i'd share some design observations.
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thinking about world layout in nonlinear games. here's maze of galious, legacy of the wizard, and the first metroid
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improved volumentric ray traced spotlight, based on a (mostly) erroneous theory of plant growth, phyllotaxis based on rotation by 2 PI / phi.
i have an artifact at pi / 4 caused by my dda function, which i need to remedy...
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beads of orange glass
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now released:
lorenschmidt.itch.io/beads-o…
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(please help spread the word)
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i am working on a small collection of board games where no one loses (a lot of them don't have goals either). this is "coral".
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i want to deconstruct the common rhetoric that lo-fi aesthetics, whether pixel art or polygonal, are a "crutch" or "devs being lazy". (thread)
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i decided to make a long lowpoly sci fi aesthetic reference thread. i do a lot of research for projects, and i thought i i'd make some of it public in case this is of use to others!
[flashing light warning]
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vine study. this was working from a photo, with a very heavy paintover. i was primarily trying to think about shapes and values, but this could conceivably turn into finished tiles with further work.
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i did another pass on the water gloss. if this were C++ or C* i'd do proper reflections, but i am happy with this given the constraints.
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i'm making a next gen open world roguelike with a persistent world. elevator pitch impossible, but:
politics-first world building, generated aristocrats, peasant revolts, combat and noncombat playstyles. emphasis on lo fi, high art procedural generation.
#PitchYaGame
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one thing i've been thinking about a lot while working on my rpg is the nature of decision making. what is it that makes a process compelling or engaging and what is it that makes it crumple into a heap of flat complexity?
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apollo guidance computer ROM. i have read about this but i've never seen photos of this before! it's incredible. the juxtaposition of this surreal textile element with these very familiar VGA looking plugs is amazing.
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i like how soft the spaces between small pillars become- the roaming hot spots and bounce light almost make the background look curved.
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in case procedural generation folks are interested, here is a fairly detailed writeup of the diablo 1 level generation code. it sounds like it uses some really interesting and underutilized techniques. boristhebrave.com/2019/07/14…
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unexpected announcement: i wrote a new alternative to perlin noise.
if it seems useful and unique enough not to collide with other licensed algorithms, i will open source this. i have to figure out licenses, but it'll be free.
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in case you missed it: i've been making a dead simple, 100% live, 100% web based game making tool
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i am working on a cellular automata clock which is choreographed to reverse and reset itself perfectly every 24 hours
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burroughs' sci fi mechanism for destabilizing planets is, essentially, impression driven social media. (from "the ticket that exploded", 1962)
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if you appreciate my work, please help sustain me as an artist or rt to spread the word! even a dollar helps. patreon.com/vacuumflowers
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reclaim the maze. reclaim "bad gameplay". thinking about living systems, slow play, and being lost as a destination.
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pet peeve: as technological detritus from the era when every corporation was trying to cash in on the popularity of emoji, many unicode characters now are automatically replaced with emoji variants. even in text editors.
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i thought something like this might be nice for a myst-like point and click game.
this is still raytraced, but it only renders some of the rays each frame. this increases responsiveness, and also gives you a dissolve effect when you move.
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remember, aspiring artists, there is no such thing as restraint. "best" is always more detail. all milk should look like undulating sheets of mucus and the background should always look like a shag carpet.
all artists agree on this. it's quantifiable.
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programming makes you marvel at things like: objects existing consistently over time, that the sum of 1 and 1 is 2, the color red.
(i am currently walking around in awe, marveling at being able to climb stairs.) #7dfps
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a little garden plot! with sometric projection. i am so excited. i love this sort of low level graphics work.
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i had a very strange dream which i am still trying to figure out. i think the point of it is this:
goodness is not believing you are good. goodness is believing that you can, without knowing it, be tremendously hurtful, and behaving accordingly.
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one of my favorite things about programming is putting diagrams in the comments
ALT an array containing the vertices of a cube, with an ascii art diagram of the numbered vertices of the cube and the three axes
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i did a pass on the garden area. these arbors have nice continuous shadows now (with a little blue, so you have a little information to infer shape + light from)
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a new animated fade in for newly discovered areas.
i have been periodically trying to take time away from systems work to do (equally vital) pleasant aesthetic touches. i think it's good for morale.
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a second pass on the stone tiles.
color support is still rudimentary, but i used the new tool for detailing them in various configurations and refining how they flow into one another.
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if you appreciate my work, please consider supporting me on patreon! or if you're not able, a rt is appreciated. patreon.com/vacuumflowers
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looking, for the millionth time, at the pokemon red and blue character sprites. they're so well designed. look at this incredibly dense, yet clean frame from a character's horizontal walk animation.
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after one false start and weeks of getting lost and backtracking for no reason, i finished faxanadu.
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lighting system technical details and performance thread 2023/03/15
the usual caveats for tech demos apply:
(1) this is in progress, so things will change.
(2) this is a testbed, not a fully functional game.
(3) like any technique, this has advantages and drawbacks.
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an editor bug (incorrect treatment of room edges?) caused this beautiful memory corruption glitch.
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my favorite thing in elden ring is that you can use the mimic's veil to turn into a coffin and pretend to float down a river.
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lizard people. i am trying to strike the right balance between relatable + clearly nonhuman.
these canonically have a third pineal eye, but it's subtle or nonvisible in some of these at this resolution.
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all cleanup all day.
i refactored the input system to tidy up how mouse events are handled (and coordinates).
i also added click effects and fixed responsiveness for a few things, which improves the tactile feedback a lot.
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pixel art texture research thread! to start this off, here are some absolutely gorgeous irregular stone bricks from magic sword (1990), arcade. these appear to be 6 color.
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make political games
make games about problems facing humanity
make great games
make well meaning but flawed games
tell your story, help those less visible and privileged tell theirs
embrace realism
embrace constructive escapism (granting safety + empowerment to those denied)
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i wish there were shows with just normal people in space. space truckers or something. no saving the world. meeting people from all over the galaxy without the military hierarchy and colonialism.
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i'm going to trim these down, but they're kind of wonderful filling the sky with unsettlingly irregular looking helices.
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the Hole Digging Game is now out! lorenschmidt.itch.io/dig
to dig a hole (or not dig a hole), play the hole digging game (or do not play it)
pay what you want, browser or windows (mac forthcoming). please help spread the word!
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