Thysbelon.Logo of a Hummingbird moth.

Kirby and the Lovely Colors

A monochromatic painted green banner that reads Downtown Grasslands. Inside the circle at the center is an illustration of a cityscape covered in greenery and surrounded by trees.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land released last friday, and it's a lot of fun so far. I love the flat color, monochromatic graphics that display during the level loading screens. I've spoken before about how I like flat colors. The definition of a "flat color" appears to be a color with no shading, texture, gradation, or halftones at all. The kind of colors I like fit the definition of flat color, but I'm okay with a bit of texture or...

Donut County and Other Games I Played Recently

Title screen of Donut County.

Out of the new games I've played recently (which isn't that many), Donut County probably has my favorite art direction. While playing it, I realized that it has many of the design points that I mentioned liking in "Talking About My Inspirations". It uses simple shapes with flat pastel colors. The pastel very nicely communicates its status as a relaxing game. The UI uses a color that appears to be black, but is actually a dark, desaturated blue, making it...

My Thoughts on Illustrator's Image Trace

An SVG of the character Amitie.

When I saw the Image Trace feature, I thought it would be an easy way to take low resolution art and convert it into high quality, perfect SVG. Yes, it had the limitation of only tracing images in black and white, but I could simply adjust the colors to work around that, couldn't I? But I realized that converting a bitmap to an SVG still takes a lot of work. Even though Image Trace does do a huge chunk for...

How to Play Custom Songs in Vib-Ribbon on an Emulator

Vibri, a rabbit character made of straight lines.

Vib-Ribbon is a game that released on the PS1 in 1999, and the PS3 and PS Vita in 2014. It has an innovative feature that allows players to insert their own Music CD into their PlayStation, and play a level generated from that CD. Players occasionally use a PC emulator to play their copy of the game so they can see 4K graphics, among other things, but the available guides on how to play custom songs on an emulator tell...

Talking About Video Games Now Because I was too Scared to Earlier

Hello! There were a few times when I was writing my previous posts that I wanted to talk about video games, but I was worried that doing so would come across as unprofessional. Well, considering that the course I'm in teaches game design, I figured it's time to stop being so scared.

screenshot of Mario Party Superstars

In my first post; I mentioned that a design can be solid on its own, but ineffective for the thing it's used for. I was thinking of Mario Party...

Newer Posts Older Posts