#Iridi

[adridoot]

mmm rough height chart

[ciccerone]

Iridi by PersonalAmi

[lonelimbless]

IRIDI, a chameleon/frilled lizard Rayman oc that I planned to be a lesser god type or at least a guardian. The clothes are not finalized.

[mostro-rotto]

L'amore è quando vedi chi ami e ti sudano le mani, le gambe diventano improvvisamente molli e il cuore batte nello stomaco. Ti piace tutto di lui, anche il minimo dettaglio; persino l'imperfezione più impercettibile risulta la perfezione assoluta. L'amore è quando vedi nelle sue iridi l'universo intero e il mondo perde il suo senso. L'amore è quando senti il suo profumo anche mentre sei seduta su una panchina, in un parco, e sollevi lo sguardo dalle pagine del tuo romanzo, perché ti sembra che lui sia lì, attorno a te. L'amore è l'invasione del suo viso nei pensieri. Quando lui ti entra con prepotenza nella mente senza avere la minima intenzione di abbandonarla e, in quel microscopio frangente di tempo, tu sei altrove. L'amore è quando le giornate trascorrono lente se lui non c'è. Cerchi i suoi occhi in quelli degli altri, ma il colore dei suoi è troppo particolare, troppo raro, tanto da non poter appartenere a nessun altro. L'amore è mancanza di rancore e odio, nel bene e nel male. Trascini con il tuo amato la valigia del suo passato, per trasportarla insieme verso un futuro migliore. L'amore è quando accetti incondizionatamente l'altro, perché semplicemente... lo ami.

Kiss Me Like You Love Me vol. 2

[silviadeangelis]

IL SUONO DEL SILENZIO

Mosse lievi e pacatea strapiombo su chete acque.Minuscola sagoma èappaiata all’eco d’un battito.Il suo unisono è una vocazione dolcissimaa un manto di soleche non tramonta mai.Vibra con delicatezzasi di lusinga ad acquietaretremolii d’un cielo ancora ignoto.Colori trasparentiin fondo e intornosono l’inizio d’un’invenzione intessutanelle iridi bagnateove l’enigma della vitafa tacere il suono del…

[elecru]

Саммит iRidi — первый день: безопасность и совместимость

«Умный дом» — это явление занимает все больше места в нашей повседневной жизни. Новейшие достижения интенсивно развивающейся технологии обсуждают на Третьем профессиональном онлайн-саммите компании iRidi. https://www.elec.ru/news/2023/02/16/sammit-iridi-pervyj-den-bezopasnost-i-sovmestimost.html

[ljsbugblog]

Large female brown huntsman (aka jungle huntsman) resting under a log beside a pair of iridescent semi-slugs. I love huntsman spiders, they get a bad rap because of how fast they can move, but they're beautiful, docile gentle giants ❤️ 🕷

Jungle Huntsman Spider, female (Heteropoda jugulans), Iridescent Semi-Slug (two individuals, Ubiquitarion iridis).

[iridiscreate]

A cat scarf I made as a birthday present.

[queenarsinoethepoisoner]

Back again! This time it’s Unus! @ask-the-watchers . For it I don’t have any other drawings just yet, but if you want, design notes/reasonings below the cut:

Ok first of all, I couldn’t decide what hair to give it, but since it’s Tango, I decided it would be better with the flame hair rather than just normal looking hair. (I also didn’t want to have to do a gradient on normal hair)

For the robe, I want all the watchers to match, except for Wyren, cus she’s the youngest and newest, so she hasn’t really gotten the memo (once I have drawn the designs for all of them I plan on drawing smth funny about Wyren not getting the memo)

For the wings, I didn’t want Unus to have just plain gray wings, cus I want each watcher to have different wings, so I added some orange around since orange is Unus’s color.

@ask-tangotek

[adridoot]

loaves freshly baked and dropped off!

[retrocgads]

UK 1987

[desenredando-pensamientos]

Este blog no es para verse bonito, sino para expresar sinceridad

[callistometry]

FREAK.

[everygame]

Iridis Alpha (C64)

Developed/Published by: Llamasoft Released: 1986 Completed: n/a Completion: Played it so, so much and still only managed a measly score of 8740.

The thing that strikes me most about Jeff Minter after, by this point, playing nearly every game that he released until 1987, his most prolific period, is his contradictions. His games have wacky narratives and comical graphics, but also have complex designs. Then despite those complex designs, they lack strict rules to game feel, and can feel not just sloppy and frustrating but almost unfinished in some cases–like half-formed ideas, untested by anyone but Minter himself. And Minter would be quick to attack on being accused of this–clapping back in his newsletters, in a public spat with Zzap 64–but by all accounts otherwise an incredibly gracious person with a ton of time for his fans.

With that in mind, it’s kind of hard, frankly, to not be frustrated with Minter’s progress in this period. To not question if there’s some sort of unconscious self-sabotage in his releases from the high point of Ancipital, with Mama Llama and Batalyx simply incomprehensible. It feels like there’s a chip on Minter’s shoulder; that in his mind he’s showing that games are more than just action adventures where you pick up objects and take them to another room or shooters where you shoot everything you can see, but his designs are so uncompromising that no one can follow him where he’s going. And yet where he’s going often seems led by whim rather than reason.

Which brings us to Iridis Alpha. A second attempt at an overhaul of the Defender-a-like after Sheep In Space, which has all of the issues discussed above, Iridis Alpha pushes things even further than Mama Llama in terms of complexity, but is actually controllable at all, so it’s at least got that.

You play a pair of “gilbys” which are robots that either whizz around like the ship from Defender or which walk back on forth on land shooting bullets in the air like a popcorn popper if you land. Your goal is, ultimately, to survive all the waves of enemies on a level and then move to the next one.

However.

After the first 3-wave level, you’re doing this with both Gilbys at the same time, one on the top screen, one on the bottom, and you switch between them by flying through warp holes left by the enemies you kill. You have to switch between each ship regularly because if you don’t, you build up entropy in the side you’re not controlling, which leads to a death.

In addition to this, you can’t just blast wildly. Every enemy you kill gains health, which is good, because as usual you die if you take too many hits. However it’s also bad, because if you gain too much health, you also die. Meaning that you either have to take some hits or land on the ground so your Gilby can discharge some of their power (which eventually leads to a mini-game where you can gain extra lives.)

There also is an extremely complex level map that I will simply express to you now that I do not understand.

The thing that strikes any player of Iridis Alpha is that it honestly feels very good to play. Your gilby stays locked in the center of the screen; acceleration and speed feels good, the auto-fire is rewarding, and while it’s a little annoying trying to take off from the ground when you’ve landed, it’s not insurmountable. Within the first waves you’re only controlling a single Gilby, so you start to pick up the energy managing mechanics. You think–adding entropy to this won’t be too hard. I can do this.

Anyway then the next thing that happens is that the third wave features ships, "lickers", that stick to you and drain your health until you explode, and they seem to do this immediately, unfailingly and be nearly impossible to shake off so you lose all your lives and have to start again.

It is the closest, it feels, that Minter has come to straight up telling the player to fuck off.

The lickers appear. This person's game is already over, they just don't know it yet.

A game like Mama Llama is simply idiosyncratic; Hell Gate is simply pushing intensity as far as it can go. But this is naked contempt. Minter has created a hard game that requires optimum concentration, but he won’t actually even let you play it to the fullest unless you can beat a truly cruel difficulty spike that isn’t even fun in the name of making it brutally clear that he’s making a “thinking man’s shooter.”

You see, the trick here is that it’s a harsh lesson in that you can’t just use auto-fire the whole time. In order to survive this wave, you have to learn to manoeuvrer your gilby at the maximum speed you can manage, avoid the ships in front of you, and quickly turn and fire briefly to spawn lickers, who begin to track you, but die if they don’t touch you within a second. Fire constantly, you spawn them in front and too many. Don’t go fast enough, they get you. Go too fast and they fly off screen before they die.

It’s probably the worst brick wall I’ve ever faced in a video game. This isn’t, say, an exacting jump in The Lost Levels; this is having to track several things at once while having complete mastery of controls. Managing it with one gilby is a nightmare and I certainly haven’t reached the point where I can do it with two–once you unlock the “full” game they show up with regularity and you have to beat the third wave licker gauntlet for a second time upside down, providing a second difficulty spike and by that point, honestly, the game feels to chaotically unfair to want to push through.

It is astonishingly frustrating, because otherwise the game has an interesting design and feels good! You start to wonder if there’s some kind of unpleasant gatekeeping here; notably the number of enemies left in a level is listed in hexadecimal so it’d be gibberish to anyone except another programmer.

The message is clear: you aren’t part of the club. The question is how much you want to try to be.

Will I ever play it again? For me, there's a limit. The lickers are it.

Final Thought: Unusually, there actually sort of is a club for Iridis Alpha, unlike, say, Mama Llama, and the very few members seem invested in having you join it. You can read an entire book that goes over the assembly code of the game–I would argue possibly the least commercial book ever published–and there’s even a YouTube video from someone laboriously trying to explain how to play it that seems to be narrated by Jerry Springer (though he doesn’t make a point of explaining how to get past the licker ships, absurdly.) There’s even an unlisted video I found that’s another play guide too! 

I appreciate this kind of thing, but seeing a rare few putting this kind of effort to express the artistry of Iridis Alpha only makes me more disappointed in what it is, a game that no human past 1987, who hasn’t just stumped up £12.95 saved up from their paper round, is going to put their time in to get past the third wave in. Christ I played it for days on end and I can’t do it consistently and using rewind feels like a cheat.

There are more missed opportunities in Minter’s career, but this might be the most insane own goal. 

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[novaearts]

| Empress of Light |

Piece I had a ton of fun with! I think it's actually the first one I've done of Lady Iridis since I made her concept art? I really should draw her more, it's wonderful playing with the colors

[iridiss]

Gee-Whiz Taffy is currently the only employee at Dollop O’ Sunshine’s ice cream parlor. Taffy looks up to his boss a lot, he wants to be just like him when he’s older. Taffy does a lot of the odd jobs required for working at the parlor, such as working the cashier, the advertisements (especially the sign twirling), janitorial work, sorting and refilling/changing the toppings, he basically does anything that Dollop isn’t already busy with. He’s very spry, very speedy, and has plenty of youthful energy, so he’s able to stay pretty on top of everything, and heaven only knows he’s never going to give up. And if that wasn’t enough, he also frequently takes care of Dollop’s daily errands and chores. Any help Dollop asks of him, he takes up in a heartbeat. And though he does get paid for any extra help, he mostly does it purely out of immense dedication to the man and his dream. He makes an incredibly loyal sidekick, apprentice, and student. He’s sure to inherit the business one day, whenever Dollop has to retire.

He has the naïveté, cluelessness, and occasionally empty-headed tendencies of any teenage boy, but he truly is a good, honest, reliable kid. He’s incredibly determined as a person. Taffy’s here to do his best, and by golly, will he do it.

Dollop calls him “my dear boy” a lot, purely out of politeness and formalities. Taffy exclusively calls him “sir.”