It’s been three years since DashCon and Fyre Fest has happened. Meaning that in accordance to the Rule of Three, in another three years, a third and final gathering catastrophe will occur with its own symbol joining the ball pit and concierge stand to create an ungodly trifecta.
[Image description: A grey cat yawning, its eyes closed and mouth wide open. This makes it look like the cat is screaming. The cat is lying on a pillow and holding its fore leg up on the back of the sofa.]
If you’ve been following pixel art blogs for a while, there’s a good chance you came across color-cycling art by Mark Ferrari before. The GIFs of detailed landscapes started making rounds on social media after Joseph Huckaby of Effect Games reimplemented the clever rendering routine in HTML5, bringing the pinnacle of 90s computer art to the present for new generations to admire.
Animations with color cycling are achieved simply by changing palette colors in an indexed painting as explained in a couple of blogposts and Ferrari’s must-watch GDC talk:
The latter brought graphical trickery to the max, blending between different color palettes at different times for a smooth transition through the day (you can play with it in Huckaby’s lesser known Living Worlds demo).
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the organizer, the software’s original author Ian Gilman is bringing Huckaby’s work further with a release of the Living Worlds mobile app. The scenes feature extra animations and special effects such as moving clouds, stars, footprints appearing in the snow, smoke coming out of chimneys, lights turning on and off, randomized weather …
The app is essentially a beautiful pixel art screensaver/animated digital image frame made to run on your (charging) tablet or phone. Since it costs $2, I imagine it will find a warm home with those of us who also buy coffee table books just to stare at beautiful art. There aren’t any sounds to go with the scenes, but after talking to Ian, we might just get some soon to get maximum mood for our living rooms.
The app will start with the January scene (seen at the top) and get a free update every month to get the next artwork. The Android app just got its release, with iOS following soon, so make sure to sign up for the mailing list on the app’s website if you want to enjoy it on Apple’s devices.
