About Showroom

Beach Punk

How it started

I've been playing Return to Monkey Island this past month and I know, its graphic style wasn't really loved and there was quite a stir which even lead up to Gilbert turning off the comments on his blog and all, but it kinda works for me. Sure, it got this Macromedia Flash cheesiness, which is horrible, but at the same time, it worked for Guacamelee! and Stick It to The Man, so who cares.

Around the same time, I've seen the following Beatles fanart on Reddit which got stuck in my brains. Really wanna try out a 1 bit pic someday, a clean and simple one.

Pixeling away

Anyway, our litte Beach Punk here doesn't really use any of those two as (style) reference, but "Draw a big head" was kinda my take-away and it sure got me pixeling and that's the important thing.

The Beach Punk came to be during a lunch break doodle and having a brite white sun blocker nose, big fat sunglasses and a wet mohawk was there right from the start. Why the Beach? Well, I'm heading of to Ireland for vacation and we'll stop by at Forest Fest where The Stranglers will be performing and — duh — Peaches.

Below, the result of my lunch break doodle:

Adding a floawing had with an ice cream cone felt naturally and at the same time filled up the pic nicely. For the curious ones: that's pistachio, strawberry and stracciatella ;-)

For the background, I've added some fluffy clouds. First, I wanted to do swirly ones, like those in Curse of Monkey Island but have them "squared". Of course, that's something not really doable in small scale PETSCII, so I wen't for just blocks which then turned into blocks and lines and wait a minute, those lines got something, adding details that aren't there, so let's under/overline all horizontal parts.

Our punk had to be shrunken down a line for adding all the over/under lines but he's cool with it. This also lead to re-doing his hairdo, sneaking in a little jmin.

Another big step was adding in waves, which was needed because, well, it's a beach, right?

The horizon, the waves, all those beautiful long horizontal lines. How about making them even longer? I've fooled around with The Chaos Engineer's C64 Raster Effect Editor before — check out my MDK pic — and this pic here is asking for some rasters.

To make it all work, my pic had to be brought into the right format and according to TCE's website, Marq's PETSCII Editor is the only tool offering the needed .pet format, so let's do some export > import > export > edit and ... wow :-)

The next steps are all more or less just tweaking.

First up: waves. It didn't really work out though.

Next, the sunglasses and the hairdo got some more love, with the former getting more readable but also less wet-mohawk-y.

Around this time, I felt it shouldn't be a stand-alone release, but checked CSDb for parties and, well, Black Valley 2025 was about to start this very day \o/

More background tweaks and re-coloring of the hair.

And a final push, which of course won't be the last.

Starting to feel like being a hair dresser, but let's straighten them out a bit; it doesn't have to read jmin for everyone...

...but then again, why not. Time to call it done.

Saving my .pe > export > input in Marq's tool > export as .pet > import in TCE's tool > tweak rasters and export to .prg

As for the compo, I've sent it in for the "Pixeled graphics" one due to having rasters on screen, but informed the orgas that it's a PETSCII pic at core. For balancing out the number of entries, Kusma and I decided to move it into the "Textmode graphics" compo.

Conclusio

Another pic, where everything fell into place within a couple of hours. Fit's the pic's feel-good mood :-)

Post-compo

Boy, the contrast during the compo almost killed my eyes, but then again, maybe it was just the stream and not how it was projected. Too bad, there was no audio from the hall; really would like heard the reactions.

Pic made 2nd place with a single point short. Love it!

---

What's CSDb thinking about this production?