“Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.” - Richard Dawkins
Evolution of a design…
It should be obvious to all video gamers that the two games, Pidgeracer and Pidgeracer Revolution have titles inspired by a certain series of video games. Who knows, if I can find a platform on which to develop a third I might even try making a play on the name Rage Racer.
Shortening pigeon to pidge turned out to be one of the luckiest developments in the evolution of Pidgeracer. It gave the game an amusing but recognisable hook but when the second game came around it also provided a direction in terms of graphics for the logo.
While I do recommend checking out the original for the graphics alone (let’s just say it gives a lot away about what I was into in the mid nineties) there wasn’t a graphic that I could say “this is the Pidgeracer logo”:
With a focus on smoother graphics for the second instalment this was about to change, and luckily those at namco had a design so beautifully and coincidentally perfect for the project it was hard to resist using it as inspiration (even if it was the third in their series):
The Rage Racer box art is something of a mystery to me. The long road, the disappearing perspective heading to the arch at the end, but the logo? - I get the shield maybe but wings? It strikes me as odd for a driving game as it isn’t a symbol I associate with racing, or at least didn’t until I realised the potential.
The thing is, not only did the winged shield suit Pidgeracer to the ground it was easy to ‘shop. You take the left ‘R’ drop the left leg and fill in the gaps and you have a rear facing P. In many ways it was perfect, and resulted in the following logo which I believed would take me through to the third instalment.
Trouble is… It doesn’t scale. The image represented here is at full size. It suffers from compression artefacts pretty badly and when I wanted to up-scale the graphics for larger monitors it lost all reasonable fidelity. Enter SVG. Using a useful tool called Inkscape which offers some of the functionality of more popular vector based animated graphics applications, I was able to trace a number of the more important details of the logo, import a few of the fiddly bitmap pieces and improve the lettering. Trace and layers in concert - the perfect combination:
While this is the size of the logo packaged with the game and is slightly smaller than the original, as a bitmap generated from an original SVG master it works nicely when up-scaled.
So you see, as a programmer I express myself through code. When it comes to my own graphics I’m pretty much useless, however, the result of being stuck unable to draw what one wants, occasionally (as with the Pidge Invaders graphic), just occasionally, seems to provide something that works quite well.
Pidge Invaders - 8-bit inspired imagery created using new Pidgeracer graphics. This came from an attempt to create a quick and dirty version of space invaders in JavaScript. It didn’t work - the graphics did.
