iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The title screen wasn't a problem because most of the art is on screen all the time, and drawing it all from back to front in a single function meant the code kinda matched the layout. I mostly didn't use the GameMaker approach of Objects and Sprites 'cos it was easier to blat things out in a loop.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 10h

Oh hey look! I'm learning things again! Usually when I make a 2D game I'll have 3 or 4 categories of things that appear in the world - players, enemies, bullets, particles etc - and I'll create a collection for each and draw them in the order I want them to appear. That... might not work here.

A spreadsheet showing text labels under the heading "Object" next to integers under the heading "Depth". The text labels are things you might name different entity classes in a game, and the depths range from -1943132160 to 50000, and are mostly clustered closer to zero.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 29/09/2026

It's kinda amazing that after all these years, we're still making great strides with pixel art upscaling.

The title screen for super mario bros. It looks pretty wonky with blobby shapes and rainbow colour fringing.

What I've actually done is blur the indexed screen buffer before doing the palette lookup. It's awesome and I love it.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 25/09/2026

Pottering along, I've hit a bit of a conundrum. One of the reasons I'm doing this is to learn where, in this game I adore and admire, the balance lies between polish and just leaving things rough and moving on. However... to do that I'm copying the game as closely as possible. So...

An editor view of a stage from Death Ray Manta SE. The player sprite is a bit left and a bit above the middle of the screen.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 16/09/2026

Huh. It turns out Bluesky doesn't support attachments in DMs? I guess that means I'll post stuff publicly then and leave folks to guess at the context :)

A skeleton asks "How's this?" while a giant octopus looms over the horizon.

A box diorama containing some cheerful slimes and crabs in a forest path.

A diorama showing goats leaping around near piles of boulders.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 10/09/2026

Yeah no this was a mistake. It seems great when you build the logic itself, but integrating it with the wider game I found that most of the bugs are gonna come from misalignment between the verbs the campaign logic says should be available and what you can actually do in a level.

The words One Week Later in a SpongeBob SquarePants title card format.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

I'm not quite sure what qLw means, but I'm reading it as "Hey Farbs you need to sleep". G'night!

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Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

I solved it by moving and rotating the camera for each one, but that means every layer of every line of text is a unique batch, which is a bit poo. Oh well. Runs fast enough. Hooray for modern (ten year old) hardware. Now on to the game itself! Except... what's that? Oh. Oh no.

A white halo around the antialiased semi-transparent edges of a sprite suggesting a bleed issue with bilinear filtering.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

Today's progress is this! I added the big chunk of text at the bottom, which updates every few seconds to show the next paragraph. The blurry effect around the edges is the result of drawing multiple layers with different rotations, which was a bit of a pain 'cos RayLib doesn't do text rotation.

The title screen for Death Ray Manta SE. Across the lower third of the screen is some glowing, blurry text. It is drawn as multiple additively blended layers all with slightly offset rotation around the middle of each line, so the text diverges more at the ends than in the middle.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 03/09/2026

Also snapping the pieces into place is satisfying, and it's relaxing to build stuff without designing it first. Anyhow, that's what I'm doing with DRM. It's not for release, but it's interesting and fun, and if I remember I'll add to this thread as it comes together! Meanwhile: Another 3D Zelda.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 03/09/2026

Previously I've rebuilt chunks of the first Zelda game in various forms of 3D, I've made Pong a whole bunch of times, and I recently had a go at pacman. Oh and of course ROM CHECK FAIL was made from chunks of about a dozen games. Building these helps me pay attention and learn what they're doing.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 03/09/2026

🐱Hey Farbs, whatcha making? 🧔Hi! I'm making this! 😼But Farbs, that's the incredible neon laserfish shmup Death Ray Manta SE. Rob made that already. 🧔That's true, and it's very cheap so I sure hope everyone has already bought a copy. Also, I'm making it again. 😾No! Bad Farbs! I want new games!

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Farbs @farbs.org · 03/09/2026

I read up a on this and it turns out, as always, that the IF community are decades ahead of the rest of us. Inform creates cool charts (pictured) ChoiceScript has automated testing: www.choiceofgames.com/make-your-ow... And these folks built a solver: www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/...

A screenshot of the Inform 7 IDE showing source text on the left and a node graph on the right. The node graph includes the annotations "Fastest possible win" and "*** Perfect, fast win".

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Farbs @farbs.org · 24/07/2026

Rob! I hope you have two hands free cos I'm gonna need you to hold the phone and, if @thalamusdigital.bsky.social are up for it, my beer.

Highlighted text from Rob's blog post, which reads:
"maybe one day Andy at Thalamus can convince someone who isn’t me to make their own DRM2"

Shiny glowy wireframe things in my Death Ray Manta fan game.

A preposterous number of wireframe spark particles.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 16/06/2026

"I guess if I'm demoing this game tomorrow I should add explosions" *6 hours later*

A screenshot from a neon vector graphics game. Thousands of white lines emerge in a firework/pompom shape from the centre of the screen. Thousands of other coloured lines from previous explosions surround it.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 15/05/2026

I probably should have mentioned this 10+ years ago but... did you ever try other facing arrangements? The VB system meant 2 out of those 5 facings didn't flip so you drew 5 to get 8, whereas something like this (pictured) you'd draw 3 for a pretty good 5. (blue lines are the "flipped" facings)

Two images showing potential arrangements of sprite facing directions. The top one shows five black lines representing drawn art and three blue lines representing mirrored versions. The bottom one shows three black lines and two blue lines.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 05/05/2026

LOL great work Bluesky. I promise tho it looks nice when not lossy-compressed to hell.

A closeup from the previous image, showing weird and horrible edge artefacts everywhere.

A closeup from the previous image, hopefully giving a better idea of what it was supposed to be doing, but honestly after this gets compressed too it could end up looking exactly the same.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 05/05/2026

There are plenty of new little glitches to clean up, but nonetheless today when I chucked FXAA and replaced it with MSAA and alpha to coverage everything was suddenly so crisp and clean! It's almost like Monster Bop got a new glasses prescription. #GameDev #IndieGameDev #GameArt

A screenshot from a cartoon-like first person action adventure game. Slimes dance in a forest setting in the foreground, and a giant pink octopus looms above the treetops and against a blue sky in the background. All the linework is sharp and clean.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 20/04/2026

Distance scaling outlines is nice! Have I shown you the SDF silliness I've been getting up to with Monster Bop? 32 colour palette, shapes are rounded and a bit wobbly, a single RGBA 128x128px texture for most tiles and sprites (eg this octopus).

A first person sword adventure game, drawn in 3D but also a bit like someone is goofing around in MS Paint.

A very large octopus leaps in the air in front of a castle.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 02/04/2026

Yes! A billionty years ago I used to goof around with DPaint doing things like this to draw waterslides.

A red slide following a convoluted path, floating in a blue and white sky gradient.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 08/03/2026

Can someone please beat Farbs Jr's score at this? He's kicking my arse. (It's a speedrunny First Person Shooter prototype based on Death Ray Manta by @fishwithlasers.bsky.social ) smdb.farbs.org

A screenshot of Farbs Jr's best run stats, showing 18 seconds and 19 frames on the clock.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 30/07/2025

I was trying to animate my little pumpkin pal, but then when I turned off the onion skinning the next frame turned out to have the most accurate human torso and legs I've ever drawn in my life. So of course I added arms but also. What. What am I supposed to do with this?!

Two images of a simple hand illustrated jack-o-lantern. The figure on the left has roots or a vine that suggest legs but definitely aren't.

The figure on the right has an entire human body.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 24/07/2025

Task List Yesterday: ✔️Chest Closed Sprite ✔️Chest Open Sprite My Brain Today: ✨ADD SMILEY FACE ✨ADD NOODLE ARMS #gamedev #gameart #hashtags

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Farbs @farbs.org · 23/07/2025

A sensible person would set up a store page and have links and maybe even have a proper trailer and also mention the name of their game instead of just posting random clips of whatever they worked on that day, but I'm not feeling sensible. I made bouncing piggies!

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Farbs @farbs.org · 18/07/2025

It's the most ridiculous art process, but I also kinda love it. Most sprites and tiles start out as 12x12, then doubled and coloured (eg pictured here), then I chuck that in the game to test roughly how it looks and animates, then drawn over another time as a 1024x1024.

A pixel art goat that looks like a coloured in, higher res version of the 1-bit goat posted before, but also a bit like the vectory goat also posted before.

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Farbs @farbs.org · 18/07/2025

Hihi! I'm still using your wonderful Goblins tileset as the basis for some of the art in Monster Bop, and just yesterday the goat went through quite a transformation ✨

A 1-bit 12x12 goat sprite displayed with a heavy CRT shader. The asset is from https://mrmotarius.itch.io/moregoblins which is excellent.

The same goat used as sprites in a first person action RPG, except now it's large areas of flat colour in a vector style that looks a tiny bit wobbly and hand-drawn. Also the goat is leaping through the air and its tongue is poking out.

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