5th out of 11 at the Revision 2024 Textmode Graphics Competition (March 30, 2024)
When Revision 2024 was coming up, I was encouraged to join its Textmode Graphics Competition. Thus, the weekend before the entry submission period opened, I began drawing up a piece of concept art for the futuristic solarpunk world where my game Cyber Purge takes place, where nature is part of all civilization, and which is populated by people of all shapes and sizes. It took only two days to finish, after which I used a third day to do some touch-ups. Ultimately, it would place 5th at a compo stacked with excellent entries, which is no mean feat for an artist entering the biggest demo party in the world for the first time!

This was drawn entirely in the original Moebius rather than my variant of choice MoebiusXBIN. Per the rules of the compo, I had to not only draw this with the standard VGA 8x16 font (instead of my usual 8x14), but also do it for the classic ".ANS" ANSI art format, which is a text file that uses ANSI escape codes (as opposed to a video memory dump like XBIN), which meant I couldn't use characters that would be interpreted as control codes in MS-DOS. This, for example, ruled out using the round dot characters (• and ◘) in any fashion, as code page 437 assigns them to the codes for bell and backspace (respectively). On top of this, I was not only limited to the default 16-color EGA palette, but also forbidden from using bright background colors (or "iCE Colors"), further restricting how I could use the 16 colors together.

Luckily, by this point I'd developed a sense for how to fit within the limits imposed upon me, and I am overall pleased with how this came out in the end.

Drawn from March 23-25, 2024.