Videogames developer hobbyist & Image processing explorer

I've been in computers since the mid-80s with some TO7, MO5, Amstrad CPC, ColecoVision, Atari 2600. The first BASIC program listings that I typed by hand (firstly copied without a chance to understand, then learning how to modify them...) gave me a creative alternative to Lego. Many thanks to Amstrad Cent Pour Cent magazine for their articles on the BASIC language, introduction and advanced courses! I still remember the trick of redefining the character set with the SYMBOL command in order to overlap several characters (with the transparent mode of char #22 ...) and thus make an 8x8 pixels "sprite" in 4 colors.

At the end of the 90s I started to practic C language and Allegro. What a pleasure to be able to display and animate sprites in DOS with a palette of 256 colors! Math and especially parametric curves let me draw my first spaceship trajectories for shoot'em up videogames.

At first I used version 3 of Allegro. I still use Allegro in 2020, in version 5, after multiple migrations and factorizations of a "home made" engine.

I'm still attached to the visual effects of past or “old school” technologies. This is the reason why I continue to enjoy developing around image processing and glitch display.

I discovered Pico-8 in 2017. This imaginary console takes the opposite path from regular evolution. More specifically it will impose harsh restrictions like a 128x128 screen in 16 colors. Each project or "cartridge" will be limited to 8K of instructions and around 40K of data in total including sprites, sound effects and music. You may probably ask, why impose such constraints on yourself these days? Making a game is complicated enough like that! I would reply that these limits are a chance. At one point you will have a hard time to find more space on the cartridge and you won't be tempted to add more levels, characters, images, features… Go back to the simple emotion of finally completing a project without getting lost in the details…

By the way, my profile picture at the top of this page comes from Pico-8. I made a transcoder that converts images to Pico-8 cartridge format.