Inception, Distraction, Rejection: The development of the Outline Online Invite

Introduction:

After Revision, Havoc told me that they were considering organizing Outline as an online event on the original date, as well as having a regular outline in the back end of the year, which they needed to announce quick.

Inception:

Having already made an invite with Trepaan for the regular outline party (to be released later this year), Blossom wanted to do a CPU-only effect as her next sizecoding project, so this mini invitation seemed like a good opportunity to develop her x86 skills.

Sticking to the theme of the party, she originally started working on this invite by herself, developing the idea of a isometric couch in front of the TV.

Distraction:

I on the other hand was looking into the JS1K scene at the time and suggested we'd try a JavaScript version of the intro, this way we could both learn a little JavaScript. So we started to work on the JS1K intro using the similar concept, but with a lot more emoticons (paint on the wall, TV, can of soda) , parallax scrolling, some procedurally generated music and counting down via speech synthesis.


Thanks but no ...

Rejection:

After completing the intro, there was something about that didn't sit right with us. It just didn't feel like our style anymore, so we took the brave decision to scrap the whole JS1K thing and get back to the original idea of doing it in 256bytes (well, without all the text and shape data). I helped out a little with some compression on the shape data, the text routine and color selection so we could keep everything under 256 bytes, and so we ended up with this little thing.

Conclusion:

I think all in all it took a couple of days to get this thing out (this includes the JS1K version) and it was another opportunity for us two to work together, which is always nice.

For more information, you can down the intro complete with sourcecode at: pouet.net

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