Our entry in the Jam section of the 33rd Ludum Dare is called It Came from the Rift. In it, you play a crazy weird eye lazer shooting horror from beyond the edge of reason hell bent on the end of intergalactic civilization. We got together on the weekend and made this game in 72 hours using all manner of tools and techniques known to us.

I sure wrote a lot of code! I basically sat in a chair for the whole weekends, tapping away madly at my computer, working on gameplay and “feel”. @nomoon sat beside me and worked on sound design, a pixel perfect animated parallax background, and a variety of other systems. Special guest Cudahy — who we say puts the “++” back in ZNC++atLaw — carefully crafted controller support and massive eye lazers that look and feel wonderful. @clangmuir, the brains of the operation, was busy the whole weekend with graphics: making the creepy looking eyes roll around in their sockets, choosing and tailoring the different eye colors so that they would be distinct without looking ham-fisted, and creating the really cool looking texture that forms the beast’s body. As well as the graphics for the lazers, each colored to fit the owner’s eye. And the ships. Did I mention the ships? He found those in a sprite-bank, but the choice wasn’t random: at one point I saw him puzzling over a set of four or five sprite sheets, comparing how they looked alongside the beast.

You see, @clangmuir’s art is the art of remix. He has an eye for design. He pours hours into his work, chopping up layers, recombining, and touching up, preparing things for the procedural animation step, and using content aware photoshop tools to turn a obscure Japanese SNES era graphics into something wholly contemporary and wholly his own.

When I submitted our game I had a momentary brain fart. We were going to opt out of the Sound category because the main theme of our game is stolen straight up and without permission from a musician who goes by Bleeds. In that moment, I thought: oh, all our pixel art comes from other games so I should opt out of that too! I couldn’t have been more wrong. The art of remix is completely valid, and I would defend @clangmuir’s labor. None of our pixel art “comes from other games”. It comes from the crazed imagination of a sleep-deprived genius using professional software tools I’ve never even touched.

So that’s why I’ve opted to opt back in to the graphics category. So go check out our game, and give the graphics category some well needed attention (or update your vote, if you’ve played already). @clangmuir spent the whole Jam making graphic and animations for our game, and as a result it looks amaaaaazing!