Davit Masia, creator of Pixatool (previously), made another app for pixel artists with Manuel Jesus Bolanos Gomez—this time with the focus on movement. Pixel FX generates particle effects such as clouds, smoke, fire and fog.
With Pixel FX Designer you can create awesome particle effects with the ability to giving them a pixelart feel by tweaking several options and render them to .png sprite sheets or .gifs.
You can export the original particle render just disabling any pixelation or palette limitation. Or you can add effects like Glow, Outline,etc... all works in real time to see the final FX visual.
There's a lot of settings to make sure the output matches the aesthetic of your game or animation: restricted pallettes, custom dithering patterns, draw-your-own particles, and so on.
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My pals in Creeper Lagoon are reuniting for the 25th anniversary of San Francisco's Noise Pop Music and Arts Festival in February! The indie troupe emerged in the early 1990s from Cincinnati and San Francisco's underground music scene with a stream of influential indie releases and grew to alt.rock fame with their excellent 2001 album "Take Back the Universe and Give Me Yesterday" before disbanding. (Dig the video above for "Wrecking Ball" from that album. It'll be a joy to see Creeper on stage again February 26 at Bottom of the Hill.
Other fine acts performing at Noise Pop include Rogue Wave, Ty Segall, Vince Staples, MSTRKRFT, Cloud Nothings, Dawes, Deafheaven, and dozens more.
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I love computer games but don't have time to plow through countless hours of padded-out nonsense. As I've enjoyed several of the picks in Joshua Rivera's roundup of 21 games you can finish in 6 hours or less, I'll surely be hitting the rest too! Pictured above is Campo Santo's Firewatch, worthy of two plays through to catch any backstory you missed the first time. Read the rest
Once again, Jen Wang (my co-creator on In Real Life and author of the amazing Koko Be Good) is convening a don't-miss "convention of independent comics artists," Dec 5/6, at the Think Tank Gallery, with Noelle Stevenson and Jaime Hernandez heading the bill. Read the rest
A case of mistaken identity lands Durham, a going no-place palace guard, a job with a troop of dwarvish treasure hunters. Seeing his big chance to make something of himself, our hero joins the Dungeoneers.
Durham is a pretty boring guy, but a common spelling mistake sends him, a lowly guard who rarely needs a vocabulary, on an adventure in place of the Keeper of the Vault! Added to a crack team of dwavish treasure seekers, Durham would be completely out of his element, if he had one. Seeing his opportunity to finally be the hero, Durham is positive he'll make something of himself. No one else shares his optimism. The gang of dwarves he is sent to aid see him as a bad luck charm, the only human woman around thinks he is comic relief, and he doesn't know a damn thing about recovering treasure.
This indie fantasy is a lot of fun. The novel has some light editing errors and isn't perfect, but author Jeffrey Russell has written a fantastic example of the fantasy quest/adventure. I'll be hoping for more!
The Dungeoneers by Jeffrey Russell via amazon Read the rest
Intervention 2016, the terrific conference about indie online creativity, from comics to blogs to makers, happens again August 14-16 just outside Washington DC in Rockville, MD! Mark and I have both spoken at prior Interventions and had a blast meeting so many talented creators in one place. About the conference:
Intervention is an awesome 3 day conference for people who enjoy learning amazing things and collaborating with other motivated people on a wide variety of projects targeted at the Internet generation.
Our name is the combination of the words “Internet” and “Convention” but the significance is deeper than that. The entire idea of this event is to Intervene and Inspire everyone to live a more creative, geeky, and fun life.
Intervention 2016 Read the rest
It's in Farsi, it's beautifully-shot film noir, it has a female lead, and you have to see it. Read the rest
[Video Link at Vimeo]
Boing Boing pal Richard Metzger produced a series of live artist showcases at SXSW 2012. One of the artists who was new to me from these sessions is Chelsea Wolfe. Richard describes her work:
Los Angeles-based Chelsea Wolfe's intense, artful folk dirges bring to mind a slightly morbid young Joni Mitchell had she grown up listening to Black Metal bands instead of the Carter Family (Still, when asked about her influences Wolfe simply replied “Hank Williams”).
Just stunning. Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, LastFM. Material in the video above is from her 2011 release, Apokalypsis. Can't wait to catch one of her live shows.
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Johannes sez, "Cory was so kind to post my TEDxVienna talk on monochrom's feature film project SIERRA ZULU. I wanted to give you guys an update.
Today we released a short film: EARTHMOVING. It's the prequel to SIERRA ZULU. We thought that's a good way to expand on the backstory and give the folks something to see while we are still working on getting the feature film financed and (hopefully) done.
We have a bunch of great actors (e.g. Jeff Ricketts, who was part of Firefly or Star Trek: Enterprise) and our crew at Golden Girls Filmproduktion (Vienna) was absolutely wonderful."
Earthmoving: A Sierra Zulu Prequel
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Danger 5 is an wonderfully kitschy and awesome indie video production about a "1960s-inspired version of World War II" in which five chainsmoking, wisecracking superspies take on Adolf Hitler.
Danger 5
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