The retro video game era inspired Caromble!'s gameplay and it's something we occasionally refer back to. One of the associations with "retro" is the lack of many of pixels. Most of our visuals don't lack those, but one of our power-downs does.. behold pixelate:
Making this effect is rather easy and you can try it out yourself! (thanks Thomas D for putting this online!)

Idea

Whilst thinking about this effect I came up with the idea to use our toybox objects to create pixelated images from normal pictures.. and aptly named it toyboxelate!

Research

Toyboxes are one of Caromble!'s most common objects and they come in a variety of colors: red, green, blue, yellow, white and black. This raises the question: How to convert an image to our Caromble! palette? I searched the internet and found a similar question: How can I convert an image's pixels to actual LEGO colors? In short the answer was to follow these steps:

• Download GIMP.
• Scale the image to an appropriate size.
• Create the color palette you want to convert to.
• Apply the color conversion ("Convert Image to Indexed Colors") using your custom palette.

Sidenote: I'm wondering if this is a common technique to create pixelart? I am no artist, but a programmer, maybe I should just ask our teammate Thomas S :-)

Application

Now that the research is done. Let's create some toyboxelated art! I followed the steps above and I also applied some dithering in the final step to reduce distortion and get a better result for this guy below: Original image
Converted image
Toyboxelated image—an ingame(!) render using many toyboxes:
Disclaimer: I've should have run this through our graphics department to make it more appealing (use better lighting for example), but I am just happy with the idea that toyboxelate works programmatically and I leave it to the reader's imagination that this looks awesome! ;-) Tip: squeeze your eyes for an even better result!

Future work

Cool, right? This toyboxelate idea isn't used in Caromble! yet. However, it was simple to implement and it might come in handy. It's a nice tool that might be used to generate level parts; I definitely would like to see this added to our level editor, especially if we decide to release it to the public. And, we can use this for performance testing. For example, I started eagerly and created an image which required thousands of objects. But my machine wasn't up for this task.. So I toned down and used smaller images. Using toyboxelate for performance testing is reserved for another post. So that's that for this retro inspired sidequest! Happy gaming! Ray P.S. Can you think of any retro elements (gameplay, art, etc.) you would like to see in this game? Let us know!