Stick Men

Instead of working on Reddenhurst as I promised people to do, I had a completely non-related flash of inspiration Friday evening and came up with a procedural generator for these low-res stick men:

21alb2u.png

I wrote a Lua script using Löve which generates series of these sheets of characters; it's quite fun to watch in motion, actually. If you want to check it out, download it here.

Algorithmically, it's quite simple; I started with some hardcoded "components" like legs, arms or head and then started placing additional pixels based on chance while keeping the resulting image symmetric. It's pretty interesting how the human brain interprets more or less randomly placed pixels as characteristic human features.

It might be interesting to make a game out of this, even though I didn't have that in mind when I wrote that script. Some folks over at TIGSource suggested a matching game, so that might be an option; one idea I had myself was a game where you have to single out an individual from a group of suspects with the help of certain clues. If only I weren't notoriously terrible at coming up with interesting game designs…

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