Now that was quite an unexpected one...
That's been a while... what the hell were we doing ?
We've been working for quite a long time now on a new production, with already tons of great things waiting to be integrated (some cool musics and graphics by friends, quite a lot of nice demo effects, even something close to a proper storyline...)
What happened then ? We've got stuck into some of the needed background graphics for at least 2 to 3 parts, for which we still need to find some kind of solutions, even if we can't maintain quite exactly what we were aiming at (hires only ones, that's probably to much a constraint)
On the code side, Joy was waiting for the background pics to move forward and I spent some time on a small C64 shell side-project (more on that in a later blog post)
At the end of 2023, Nyke came up with a logo pic that we believed we could take advantage of by adding some animations around to make a small demo before we could finish the more consistent one. It was a good candidate for some pixelated graphics pulsating background and I already wanted to use one of the nice tunes Magnar made for us, so I started putting together some code around it and Nyke kindly agreed not to release the pic alone.
I went with identifying which parts of the background I could change without destroying anything and came up with a little pulse animation. Some specific areas of the picture had to be saved and restored in order to avoid damaging some non 4x4 pixels areas.
After a while we found how we could use some sprites in the lower border in order to be able to shove in the credits and greetings while keeping the chunky 4x4 pixels we had in the animation.
I used 6 sprites for a single line of text of 9 characters and pre-computed all of the animations effects inside a 16bits words stream containing both write offsets and pixel position for pixels in a 2x2 pixels matrix.
As Nyke was attending the X party 2024 it seemed the best place to release this small demo, hope you liked it as much as we liked putting it together.
It's always great to have a live release with an audience, even for such a small production.
Thanks again to Magnar for providing the great tune,
You can download the demo on CSDB
You can download the source code on our github too