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Wobblepaint

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445 pointspolm2366 comments

Who would have thought some wobble would add so much to the experience. This is wonderful and I don't think it would be half as good if it didn't wobble.

I couldn't agree more. In these difficult times this has given me hope both in terms of the state of humanity and also in the future of the internet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

thanks

For those not wanting to click a link without explanation: It's "Juice it or lose it", a talk about how adding simple effects to a game can make it much more immersive and fun. It's well made and inspiring talk, breaking down how much can be done with so little. Worth a watch.

I like the version hosted here, the slides are easier to see: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016487/Juice-It-or-Lose

I think it would be ok to jello or jiggle too. The qix is inspired.

Has anyone ever made a... wobble code editor?

That's one of these ideas I wish I had come up with. It sounds fun to program, fun to use and even potentially useful to make cutesy gifs.

I wasn't familiar with PICO8, it seems to effectively be a faux-retro console emulator that you can use as a sandbox to build programs (that can then be exported to a web player, which is quite nifty): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico-8

Unfortunately it's a proprietary platform.

It's $15 to be able to write programs for the platform, but you can export them to html5 to make available for others to play online for free. There's a pretty large library of such games hosted on pico-8's website.

There are some open-source alternatives like TIC-80 and PixelVision8. Personally, I'd only recommend them over pico-8 if $15 is a serious barrier or open source is an absolute must. They all have their various strengths and weaknesses, but pico-8 seems to be the best optimized for pure, unadulterated fun.

One downside of PICO-8's closed source is that it can't easily be ported to different architectures by fans, so you're limited to Windows, Linux (x86) and the Raspberry Pi (and HTML/JS, but just the player). There's no Android port.

TIC-80, on the other hand, runs more places (Android!). And someone has ported it to run on OpenDingux portable handhelds, there's a RetroArch core, etc.

That said, PICO-8 is super, super polished and absolutely worth the $15.

Also OS X, it's worth saying.

In Celeste, there's an easter egg that lets you play the original PICO-8 game on an in-game computer. How was this accomplished, if porting it themselves isn't possible? Did they have to remake the entire game?

They might have built their own pico-8 runtime/emulator. Alternatively, porting the game to use another Lua runtime (like LÖVE) would probably not be that hard. Ex, here's a pico-8 runtime in LÖVE:

https://github.com/picolove/picolove

It's a small game, they could port the entire game to another language or platform pretty easily.

Yeah, they remade the whole game with some help from the PICO-8 developer.

https://twitter.com/MattThorson/status/1032067981600124928

There is a pico8 emulator that lets you play games on some handheld console and I understand that an Android version is in development. https://0xcafed00d.itch.io/tac08-rg350

I paid for Pico. Mostly to play games on rpi, not making them. Being closed source is still a drag since I'm used to being able to patch and adjust the things I use. That I can't is immediately felt.

Yeah and the alternatives like tic have pretty major setup problems on rpi.

I haven't tried it out so I can't speak to the quality of it but there's the LIKO-12 as a free alternative: https://liko-12.github.io

I've also seen SCRIPT-8 as another FOSS alternative: https://script-8.github.io/

Thank you! I've been looking for a browsser-based fantasy console.

TIC-80 is also good:

https://tic80.com

CHIP-8 is the progenitor of all these platforms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8

Its worth the money, I wouldn't expect this sort of thing to be free.

Yep, slightly under the cost of two decent brews for hours of fun. Lua is easy to learn, there is a ton of Pico-8 info. Give a search for the Pico-8zine, a ton of tips and great ideas. Pico-8 has been talked about here and Hackaday.

Oh to be clear it's not that that bothers me, it's the fact that it's closed source. That's just personal preference though.

I'd be fine with a "source available" paying solution for instance, as long as the terms of the license are reasonable. This way at least I know that if the project goes defunct I'm not stuck with apps that I can't easily run anywhere anymore. See all these Flash games that nobody can easily play anymore.

An example of software that works that way is SQLite: they sell extensions as source code with a perpetual (non-open-source) license.

>Unfortunately it's a proprietary platform.

On the other hand, being closed source help getting the "community" feel where people discover some quirk and secret features of a strange and not-totally documented device.

That said, I hope it become open-source when every secrets have been discovered.

This is genius. It's one of those things that is sooooo simple but soooo good. The wobble makes even the crappiest little sketch come to life. I think that's what's so awesome about it.

I think this is drawing on the vibe from animation styles where the artist draws several of the same frame, and minor imperfections are seen across each. (Dr. Katz etc seem to similarly be trying to mimic this.) A good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53s5uln_bw4

The question though is why does this look so appealing? I guess it's probably because in general we see motion as a proxy for if something is alive, since things that are alive are never completely still.

> (Dr. Katz etc seem to similarly be trying to mimic this.)

Fun fact: Tom Snyder (of Dr. Katz fame) invented and patented the technique, called "Squigglevision".

"Squigglevision is a patented method of computer animation in which the outlines of shapes are made to wiggle and undulate, emulating the effect of sketchily hand-drawn animation. Tom Snyder of Tom Snyder Productions invented the technique, which his animation studio Soup2Nuts subsequently used in Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, Dick and Paula Celebrity Special, Home Movies, O'Grady, and Science Court." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squigglevision

Also used in Moby - Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT6XCvDUUsU

Now I understand the "baba is you" aesthetic!

It makes me feel that the things on the screen are not only alive, but also a little bit restless.

If anyone else was unsure at first like me: Drag the left-most button downwards to access all the brush and paint options.

This is awesome! I should really check out the PICO-8, or maybe something similar but open-source.

You are a legend - thank you sir (or madam)

You can read the GP's post, but you were not able to read the text in the TFA?

"Instructions

CTRL-Z, CTRL-Y (or S,F) to undo/redo CTRL-C, CTRL-V to copy and paste between doodles W,R to switch between doodles (or use the menu buttons) TAB to toggle menu Mouse wheel (or e,d) to change brush size RMB to pick up a colour RMB in menu colour palette to select secondary colour (used for patterns) LMB+RMB in menu colour palette to set the background colour

To save all doodles, use the cartridge icon button in the pull-down menu.

Wobblepaint saves data to itself. To start a new wobble cart, type LOAD #WOBBLEPAINT from inside PICO-8 and then save it as something. The data storage is reasonably efficient so you can get around 20~100 doodles to a cart depending on complexity.

To save a gif to desktop, use the gif button to record a second of looping wobble. If you want to record multiple doodles (e.g. for an animation or story), press tab to hide menu, CTRL-8 to start a gif, W,R to flip through the doodles, and then CTRL-9 to save the gif."

They even go into details on how to use a game controller.

This is so very PICO-8. Loving the creativity coming out of pico sketches!

Reminds me of "Squigglish!"

https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/16/14945760/squigglish-photo...

Remind's me of the SNES game "Yoshi's Island". That game used wobbly crayon for a lot of graphics, including goal UI: https://youtu.be/qZwjQu4lQm8?t=1341

Hmm, when you said that I thought of Kirby's Epic Yarn on the wii, where everything is made of yarn. It's ~ 10 years old, so more nostalgia than retro.

Reminds me of Dr Katz animation:

https://youtu.be/CWaNSfkWb6s

I believe they called their technique wobblevision.

Surely inspired by Roobarb and Custard (1974): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4aVXeDg3U4

Duh dee dee daah, duh dee dee daah, duh dee dee do do daaah...

I was about to post the same video and say the same thing! I heard the theme tune in my head as soon I looked at the tool.

Squigglevision! I remember it from Home Movies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squigglevision

Ha!

"It costs just as much to do a helicopter scene as it does to do a living room scene."

Oh great, there goes my entire morning. Going to have to tell my boss I am sick or something and won't get everything I said I would done...

It's just like Dr Katz.

Just a heads up, the viewport scrolls in Firefox on Android while you're painting. Everything still works otherwise, but it makes it hard to draw because the canvas is moving with your finger. I'm guessing it has something to do with the URL bar changing the viewport height because the extra space seems to be roughly the same vertical height.

Awesome work by the way, it's a lot of fun to play with.

Evan - tried emailing you but both your inboxes at Intoli are full. Interested in your residential proxies!

Can you save the gif with a browser ?

edit: I just saw that they appear at the left side of the browser page. I was focused on the embed part.

Yes, right click it to see "save image"

In traditional 2D animation I think this effect is not called "wobbling" but "boiling"

Feels weird to have one of these threads without a subthread of people posting what they made in the tool, so: https://i.imgur.com/rR5On9G.gif

Reminds me of the menu of Big Red Racing game from the 90s.

So much fun with friends after school.

Fun looking app. Kind of reminds me of Comic Sans, though xD

https://www.youtube.com/c/umamianimations

could anyone explain what this means "BTW I had no idea CTRL+key and TAB had their own ORD values" I did a search but got nothing useful.

Possibly this:

When a key is pressed, a key-code can be read from your program to detect the event and the associated key.

Pressing 2 keys (as described in this case it seems) has it's own key-code, instead of a combination of the 2 key-codes for each individual key.

For example CTRL could have key-code ==> 0008 And 'TAB' could have a key-code ==> 0002 But pressing CTRL+tab ==> 1010

Ok, I guess these might be scan codes by another name. Thanks.

It's interesting how the wobble lends a bit of depth to the picture, as you can see the layering. Simple and surprisingly effective.

Would be great if this worked on mobile - unfortunately drawing triggers the "drag down to refresh" gesture on Chrome.

This is great -- I just used it to draw a (cartoon) objective landscape for a stochastic objective, for my Optimisation class.

Nice wobble.

But I think drawing without the wobble is easier.

Wouldn't it be better to add the wobble effect after the drawing is done?

Does the licensing agreement apply to the drawing program or the art created?

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

I like it. it reminds me of Dr Katz Professional Therapist

how does it work? are you drawing to a canvas but then it's cycling through displaying 2-4 slightly different transformations of the canvas?

I suspect the draw tools simultaneously draw to 2-4 different canvases, with the input coordinate transformed for each, and the display cycles between them.

Just transforming the canvas itself can't explain how it works with patterned paints.

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