!!Con West 2020 - Wesley Aptekar-Cassels: Plotty Bird: Making Modern Games on Retro Pen Plotters!
Channel: !!Con
Date: 2020-03-20

Presented at !!Con West 2020: http://bangbangcon.com/west

If you wanted to print a diagram on a piece of paper in the 60s, a pen plotter was the way to do it – a device that would take a pen and physically move it over a piece of paper to produce a diagram. While printers are clearly a better way to print images now, there’s still joy in watching a robot scratch out perfect lines on a blank sheet of paper. When I happened across a vintage pen plotter from the mid-80s, I had great fun making all sorts of art and pretty pictures. But I wondered – could I do more with this? How can we stretch this medium into something new and surprising? Using it as an output device for playing games seemed too good an idea to resist.

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