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GDC08: Inchworm: Mario Paint meets Photoshop
It has been almost a year since we heard anything new about Fatbits Pocket Painter, and we were beginning to worry that the project had been abandoned. While homebrewers already have Colors! to satisfy their DS-digital-painting needs, we really wanted to see what Bob Sabiston, the programmer behind Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly's Rotoshop software, had come up with.Dismissing concerns of its halted development, the painting and animation application has appeared at GDC, this time under the name Inchworm. Along with its reintroduction comes a new site packed with tutorial videos and user-uploaded samples/flipbooks. Artists can easily create and share their work online, all with a robust selection of drawing and editing tools.One unique feature we spotted in Inchworm is the ability to draw under a painting without having to create and move around new layers. Very useful for animation, we hear!We're not sure if Inchworm has found a publisher yet, but we hope someone helps this program hit the mainstream market. Bob Sabiston definitely sees potential in the software: "If people can make money selling math and brain teasers to kids, imagine how popular a program that lets you draw and make cartoons [would be]!"
Fatbits Pocket Painter, Mario Paint for the DS
Having created Rotoshop, the software behind uniquely-animated films like Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, Bob Sabiston is no stranger to new ways of manipulating media. His latest project, Fatbits Pocket Painter, takes advantage of the Nintendo DS' hardware features to create both pixel-based and vector-based illustrations. The DS' top screen shows the entire canvas while the touchscreen displays a close-up view for editing. Fatbits won't replace your copy of Adobe Photoshop, but with features like color palette mixing, variable thickness paintbrushes, and opacity sliders, the program is a lot more sophisticated than MS Paint. The application even supports an animation mode and playback for recorded sound effects (via DS mic) just like Mario Paint. Users will be able to share their complete creations or works-in-progress by uploading them to a web server with the DS' WiFi feature. While Nintendo is aware of the project, there are no cemented plans for a commercial release. Sabistan admits that he might eventually cast the program loose for the homebrew community to play with if he is not able to find a publisher. For now, a brief user manual and a gallery of images created with Fatbits are available.
