About Showroom

Taunting Hands

aka Screaming Machine Vs. Snow Man

How it started

I knew that there were two parties this weekend, but I haven't had any compos in my mind for months now due to working on BigBoxCollection.com and a private little — well, it grew rather big quickly — PETSCII project that I can't share anything about it yet.

Anyway, woke up and saw Goerp had shared a pic mentioning a Theme Reveal and as it turned out, there is a live pixeling thingy at Fjälldata 2025 and the theme revealed Friday night at 20:00 was "Man vs Machine" and pics must include "Snow" and "Screaming".

Well, I was hooked instantly! Only problem was, it's Saturday 11:00 already and the deadline is 16:00!

First idea that popped into my head was a guy wrestling a candy or arcade machine that's standing somewhere out there in the snowy night. O...K... brain, that's a bit much, but I started doodling anyway which turned out to be a guy kneeling in the snow after being defeated by a machine.

Man in the snow, check.

Cool man with cool sunglases in the snow, check.

11:32 and I've got a rough idea. Man in the snow is now a robot. That robot had some fun and made a snowman, but wait, what's that? 981 terraflops in the head but still can't figure out hands!

Some more doodling trying to make the "that's not a hand" idea fly.
12:06, the sun is out, let's time-out for a short walk.
13:25, back again and thus the end of intermission. Refilling my energy levels with a lovely piece of delicious Ribiselschaumschnitte.

While making the right hand as ridiculous looking as possible, I thought, why not try hiding a litte FU AI there?

OK, that escalated quickly, it's now a full blown Fuck you AI! and it just works. The robot's not crying out in frustration anymore but in pure hatred due to being taunted by our snarky snowman.

15:17 and a lot of fine-tuning left to do. I've started the pic on my Chromebook and thus working via touchpad up until now, but with time running out, I'd better switch to the desktop PC and use a mouse.

Skipped the background (thought about doing a horizion at least) but there are only 10 more minutes left!

No time for making a .prg myself, so let's just use the export, write a little .txt with some info bits and let's .zip everything up and it's done!

Conclusion

Wow, "real-time pixeling" — if that's a thing — is fun.

Post party notes

So many fantastic pix in the various GFX compos and the "Bare Hand Party Pixeling" entries were top notch too. Wish I had time fleshing out a background. As always, thanks for cheering at the party and for voicing the robot's Ah! :-)

Here's a snippet from the party: