Hex fiend mac glitch art
I’ve saved it as “bwglitch.gf” in my project’s images folder. My game starts with this GIF (warning: very quick, flashing GIF). Luckily for us, using GIFs as a background is exactly the same as using any other image. With all this inspiration in mind, it was time to start coding! GIFs as backgrounds There are lots of ways to mess with text online the Twitter account is a novelty account completely dedicated to writing strangely distorted tweets: So you can add all the accents in the world to a single character, which quickly makes it bloated and unreadable. ñ is the combination of n and ˜.Ī fun fact about Unicode is that you can technically stack combining characters. If you’ve taken a Spanish class before, you’ll remember there’s “n” and there’s also “ñ”. These are the accents and marks that can combine with other characters to create new, modified characters. Unicode has codes for standard characters like “A”, but it also has codes for combining characters. If you’ve ever gone to a website and seen “ &” instead of “&”, that’s because the encoding for the ampersand wasn’t properly, well, decoded. Unicode is the standard for encoding text, including alphanumeric characters, symbols, accents, and all other visual markings we use to write to one another. Zalgo textĮven weirder and sometimes more unnerving than broken GIFs is broken text, or Zalgo text. An Internet without GIFs would be stale indeed, and there’s real beauty in this slightly outdated, clunky image format. I wanted GIFs (broken and otherwise) to feature heavily in the game, namely as backgrounds, to add movement to the game, and act as an homage to this uniquely Internet form of art. If you’re not aiming for perfection anymore, a lot of possibilities open up. But it’s a good example of what you can do when everything goes wrong. Here’s an example: If you remove the I-frames, there’s no more point of reference, and the P-frames will bleed into each other. Videos are made of frames: I-frames (static reference images) and P-frames (images that show the difference between frames). To really make a mess of things, you can remove crucial parts of the video used to make the GIF.
HEX FIEND MAC GLITCH ART FULL
One way to “break” a GIF is to compress it heavily, thereby losing information you need to make the full GIF.
HEX FIEND MAC GLITCH ART SERIES
It also supports animation: basically, it stores videos as a series of images that play sequentially and keep looping.īroken GIFs are a truly weird subset of animated GIFs. GIFsĪ GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is an image format, suitable for simple images, like logos or photos with few colors.
I was especially into broken GIFs and glitchy text. I didn’t even have to write the story myself, since it was a class project.īut I do know a thing or two about JavaScript, so I decided to make a browser-based game, inspired by Internet aesthetics and the fringe opportunities of front-end coding. Pure text, no visuals, certainly no mind-blowing physics engine. And my only experience making any kind of game was a terminal-based adventure game in college. I don’t know the first thing about graphics. Each of these games effectively built mood and philosophical dilemmas with solid writing and well-chosen visuals. When Mass Effect came out, I was immediately drawn to its atmospheric universe and the moral choices you had to make. Later I fell in love with The Longest Journey, a sci-fi point-and-click with a female protagonist (!) and captivating storytelling. My favorite was Baldur’s Gate, a text-heavy Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game which relied more on text than stunning graphics.