One Bit Wonder

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One Bit Experience, Part 1 16 comments
  • Screenshot of our first landscape scene
November 20, 2009
The One Bit Experience site is our side pet-project that we started several months ago. Our goal: to make a simple website that sparked both of our interests and imaginations to be used for our main homepage. Camile indulged herself in paints, colored papers, and glues to construct an imaginative landscape. And Leon spent most of his time photographing and re-constructing the images as a full-blown virtual world right inside the browser. We're still working on the site, but continue reading to take a look at our progress thus far.
  • Final design direction with highland coo

Read our previous post to see some very early sketches. Those sketches quickly led to the design direction above featuring the highland coo as a user-controlled character.

  • Paper models ready to be cut out in Photoshop
  • Paper models ready to be cut out in Photoshop
  • Paper models ready to be cut out in Photoshop

After building the highland coo and some of the scene elements with paper and paint, photographs were made. The exciting part was cutting them up and creating a new world using our little website/game engine. The engine is tile-based, meaning it uses tiles as a basic building block (think Super Mario Bros. on the NES). Using our simple map generator built with processing, we mapped our images onto virtual tiles and created our first landscape using Adobe Flash.

  • Map generator tool used to compose landscapes

By the way, the scene transforms into nighttime when the sun sets in Los Angeles. The weather (wind and rain) is also driven by Los Angeles data retrieved from Yahoo weather.

  • Screenshot of highland coo under the moonlight

The final site will allow visitors to move the coo around to navigate the website (by following the potatoes) and admire the scenery. Content (text and images) will float in the background. Our plan is to have a different landscape for each page of our website (one done! Two to go). If we ever finish, we'll post a link.

Comments

  • Hunz bunz07:48 am 11/21/2009
    Like! <3
  • p09:16 pm 11/21/2009
    that's really awesome. can't wait to see it in motion
  • Tony Huang06:42 am 11/22/2009
    That's so much detail.. and I bet a ton of time. I wouldn't be able to do it that's for sure lol. I want to see it move though, so hurry it up! :)
  • Jason dela Cruz06:55 am 11/22/2009
    Wow. Great job! The progress is wonderful. I had no idea your work was so intricate.
  • Fei08:10 am 11/22/2009
    I love it. Can't wait to see everything up and running
  • rebecca suh 06:23 am 11/23/2009
    :) i saw the preliminary steps of this idea and now it's going to be up and running.... .... yay!
  • Mary08:41 pm 11/23/2009
    so awesome! I love how it's got actual LA weather too...Is there a cheat code to make it arbitrarily snow?
    Reply from One Bit
    haha, no cheat codes yet, but i like that idea
  • Stella05:43 am 11/24/2009
    I want to see the movie!!!!
  • krister05:49 am 11/24/2009
    very nice!
  • Thy04:13 am 11/28/2009
    I love your highland cattle and I love your website idea! I'm almost afraid that you'll complete it; I can already see myself glued to the laptop, chasing after potatoes...
  • juliana01:11 pm 12/04/2009
    your blog is already very beautiful! and it is so nice to see the process, and the hard work to get in something very nice. thank you for sharing!
  • Jay04:35 pm 12/25/2009
    Great looking textures, was curious what material (paper) are those tree leaves? they seem to have a great leather-esque thickness but with flex to bend. incredible work
  • Tristan L'Abb09:42 pm 01/25/2010
    Yeaaa :D GREAT suff
  • Adrian07:57 am 02/25/2010
    Absolutely love it! <3
  • Fawn12:39 am 03/12/2010
    I love this. I really appreciate the charming character inherent in handmade papercuts. Keep making!
  • Josie07:53 pm 05/08/2010
    WOW! Inspiring is an understatement. Thanks for letting us in on this wonderful creation!
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