REXPaint Art Gallery +63 (Patreon)

It had been over a year since I last updated the online REXPaint gallery, so it was definitely about time to organize all these images and I spent all day doing just that.

I'm sure there are a ton of cool works out there that I miss and will likely never know about since I don't actively search for it (and more importantly many people don't explicitly point out what tools they use!), but I am always keeping an eye out for anyone indicating that they used REXPaint for a given project so that I can collect and share some samples with everyone via the website.

Eventually my todo pile reaches critical mass and I've gotta make time to go through it all documenting the sources, creating thumbnails, etc. (I remember a little scare earlier this year when I suddenly discovered I'd accidentally deleted all my reference material collected since the previous update, but fortunately managed to find another copy and from then and into the future the temporary holding area lives in the parts of my drive that are included in the automated backups :P)

This time I've gone through about a hundred entries I'd saved and added 63 of them to the site. As usual there's a variety of art, maps, abstract pieces, UI mockups and other concept work. See the Gallery page to explore the entire set (it's always organized from newest to oldest), though I'll highlight some here with additional comments.

As always we have more works by the prolific Polyducks, who also contributed to Recompile, which includes a lot of Cogmind-like aesthetics and for which REXPaint was an important production tool. (Polyducks was a big help in REXPaint's early years, helping track down bugs and suggesting features, and still continues to share some of his font and palette work to this day.)

Peter Queckenstedt used MRMOTEXT and the C64 palette to create this demo when getting warmed up with REXPaint:

(MRMOTEXT by Mrmo Tarius was converted over to REXPaint's format by Polyducks.)

I can say Peter warmed up nicely, as this piece of his, "Salvage," is awesome:

I only saw one piece by @fakenatan, but "Gnome Hideout" sure is a great one:

Aside from Polyducks, @ASnowyShip is another pretty prolific REXPaint user I noticed over the past year, often using patterns in their work:

But also using RP to put together some Caves of Qud fan art like this Eater's Flesh :)

Roguelike mockups are my favorite category of REXPaint work (that's what I originally built it for, and only later later decided to try ASCII art concepts as well, which worked out okay :D), so I was happy to discover Flap Wrap had been working on some. Check out those mountains!

There's something about a roguelike mockup that really gets your imagination flowing :)

Mark Egli finally finished those playing cards he was working on. Great stuff, though I don't have a set yet...

Dee Liteyears has some neat pieces--I really like the perspective on this one:

And they also took a number of pictures of their art displayed on actual CRTs for extra effect:

zen0m has also been using CRT effects and other tools on top of the underlying REXPaint workflow (although in this case it's a shader rather than the real thing :P)

Over a year ago Elfgoat_ got a pretty big reception when they shared early concepts for a neat roguelike aesthetic on r/RoguelikeDev:

You can see more examples in one of their sharing threads, demonstrating other types of ideas as well. Also notice the 2x2 Ogre above ;)

But like many concepts we've seen over the years, this one disappeared pretty quickly, never to be seen again. While coming up with unique concepts to begin with isn't easy, it's also just the first step in a much longer journey, so it's no surprise that lots of promising projects that spark the imagination end up disappearing like that...

Over on the Roguelikes/Cogmind Discord, TrumanStarr shared a really great take on Cogmind's Grunt tile expanded into ANSI form. I really like this style!

We were told there would be more, but are still waiting on those :)

Skaruts, a roguelike developer and frequent user of REXPaint, recently created a couple comic strips which came out really nicely (because these might be hard to appreciate via Patreon, you can also check out the original Part 1 and Part 2):

It's always fun to see how REXPaint helps people unlock their creativity, and on that note I've always wanted to hold a REXPaint art event, and still look forward to one because it will happen one day... but I admit at this point I've been talking about it for years now :P

The plan has always been to wait until Cogmind is done, and combine that event with a REXPaint 2.0 release (since all that would be a major diversion from any other project I'd be working on at the time), but clearly I can keep myself busy for a while with Beta 11 and all this Cogmind stuff xD

Anyway, one day :)

In other REXPaint news, I don't have skins on the Resources page yet, but if any of you would like to use "Darkula," a custom REXPaint skin made by KernelPanic, you can drop this text on its own line in data/skins.xt to add it to REXPaint:

"Darkula" {40,42,54} {98,114,164} {248,248,242} {255,85,85} {248,248,242} {98,114,164} black gray_8 {68,71,90} {40,42,54} {98,114,164} white black {67,18,79} {41,10,48} {255,255,255} {204,204,204} {248,248,242} {255,85,85} {68,71,90} {98,114,164} {98,114,164} {255,85,85} {138,161,229}

Darkula preview:

And for those who use Python, over on the forums NeonCarbide provided a script for creating REXPaint palettes from a simple PNG, or from a site like lospec.com