That's no PETSCII, that's a .koa
Jazzcat got in touch with me back in July 2024 about a bit for, well, let's not spoil the surprise, but anyway, we've mailed back and forth and of course Syntax 2024 came up too. With the GFX compos being open for remote entries, I planned to submit a PETSCII. I didn't have an idea right away and with the party being a couple of months away, I thought putting it on the back burner would be OK. At the same time, my C64 time slots were fully booked with learning how to code and then to top things off, there are other C64 things happening too that I won't spoil here either, but long story short, I haven't had anything until the week before the compo.
Why the sudden inspiration? A silly discussion that started with panda bears - the ones from Zoo Schönbrunn moved back to China this September - which lead to koala bears (yeah, not bears, but still called bears) and ended with my wife and I talking about drop bears was just the spark of inspiration that I needed. Syntax being an Aussie demo party and drop bears being an Aussie joke naturally led to thinking about doodling a silly pic and guess what, that's right up my ally so let's dive into it!
During a lunch break at work, I've started up PETSCII Editor, set border and background to grey and pixeled a rough layout of eyes, nose and a gnarly mouth with big fangs. That's the idea, just the monster coming right out of the monitor.
So far, I haven't really used letters in any of my pics and I thought the drop bear's fangs would be something that could work well, so switching to lower-case it was. Also, I do like a challenge and doing another lower-case pic (Tapper is a lower-case pic too but for a different reason which I didn't even follow through in the end) would keep it fresh, although I'm not sure if lower-case is something others really care about. In my book, it's a (tiny) flex because of the GFX chars available being cut down significantly.
Anyway, I just started messing around with it and didn't save each idea except the following one which is a weird thing in itself: I do remember playing around with n and m but now idea why there's a j though 😃
Main result of the first session is having a) turning the pic green, b) shrinking down the pic from full screen to a smaller square and c) having freed up some space for adding fluffy koala ears; gotta have those, right?
Apropos "first session": Over at CSDb Wile Coyote asked how much time a PETSCII takes, and while there's no general answer to that question, in this very instance I went from initial sketch to finding a path to follow in about 30 minutes. Lucky me :-)
During the second session, I worked on the ears and shifted some pixels here and there. Idea of using letters was shelfed, but going lower-case does allow using the four hatched chars which I wanted to use for a long time and thus went all-in with them for the ears.
Ears got some tweaks and the facial features got worked on too, the shape of the nose was corrected and the fangs got pointier and bloodier, resulting in a more menacing pic.
A final round of teaks later that day lead to refining everything again and giving him an even more intense and grim look. That boy has seen things you tourists wouldn't believe, so run!
A very quick pic done in three short sessions over two days that IMHO turned out great; I'm really, really loving the face and the fuzzy ears add the right amount of silliness to it. It also has a hidden Grandpa Monster vibe which just adds to it.
With Syntax being an Australian party, there was no way of me joining the live stream awake, but I dug up an archived stream of the stream first thing in the morning to check the compo and the results. Well, according to points, it was quite a tough race but my freaky .koa did indeed manage to get placed 4th! Love it \o/
Great work!
Cool work! Nice hair :D
Very cool !
What a charmy petscii! :)
Crazy, in a very good way :)
Thx, folks!
Tried hard capturing a Drop Bear's essence