Spriter is Coming

A little while back I started doing some work and collaboration with a great guy and game industry supermodel by the name of Mike Parent. I came across one of his game projects, Prophecies of Nnar, that he was developing and designing from the ground up with a custom built animation tool called Spriter. Spriter allowed him to very quickly bring together all of his game assets, like stacks of character body segments, and create powerful modular animations that could be interchanged with other characters and art on the fly with very low memory overhead. When I got a look at it, there was just an alpha build being kicked around that was in the process of being completely rebuilt, but even then it was impressive to look at.

This is a subject I’ve been needing to blog about for a long time, because this thing on the internet called Tzigla really needs to be flaunted. Tzigla (I like to say it like ZIG-LUH or TUH-ZIG-UH-LUH when I’m not in a mood to slur) is place for artists of all skill levels to join up to create tiny pictures to be juxtaposed next to other tiny pictures to create one big picture. A large-scale Exquisite Corpse. There are sections just for pixel artists, sections just for people more casual about drawing, places for the big dog advanced artists, and even sandbox boards meant just for you to play and see how it feels to work off another person’s tiles without regard to quality. And excuse its funny name, in Romanian “tzigla” literally translates into “roof tile” (the developers, who are altogether a great pair of people, are Romanian). So really, it’s fitting!

The best way to describe what happens on Tzigla is to just show a picture that was created from start to finish on the board. It was made by 23 artists with a total of 48 individual 100×100 pixel squares, and nobody saw each other’s pictures, only a tiny revealed glimpse of the borders that had to be blended from. Take a look!

View the finished board on Tzigla!