8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box

If you are here and you haven’t seen Mark Ferrari’s GDC talk, you really should sit down and watch it. He is perhaps the greatest pallete animator of all time. Even if you aren’t familiar with the games he worked on, HN folks have likely seen his gallery of single-image animations linked below. ▶ this video link

If you want to play with software rendering, here's probably the shortest code that will get an ARGB8888 2D array from main memory to the screen efficiently for all platforms using SDL2 in C link you'll need to do the translation from a 320x200x8-bit palletized framebuffer to ARGB yourself ;) If you want to get inspired by what can be done with palletized framebuffers check out link (click Show Options) and the GDC presentation by the artist ▶ this video With that you can fire up link for that classic Deluxe Paint IIe vibe. Or, link for something more modern.

Mark was nice enough to invite me to his home studio when I was a new high school grad to talk working in games as an artist. He told me the story of the fight over dithering. I give him strong partial credit for ending up a game engine/art pipeline coder instead and got to thank him after his most excellent GDC presentation on the lost power of palettized textures ▶ this video You can see that power in action here link (Hit show options) link BTW: Deluxe Paint has been remade in Python if you want to give it a try link

You might enjoy an entire talk on using a limited color palette for graphics in early games and how it stimulated creativity ▶ this video "In this GDC 2016 talk, Terrible Toybox's Mark Ferrari discusses and demonstrate some of his techniques for drawing 8 bit game graphics, including his celebrated methods for use of color cycling and pallet shifting to create complex and realistic background animation effects without frame-animation GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every weekday. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives."