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Mark Ferrari

Drawing more from a limited palette

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An illustrator and game artist known for Lucasfilm backgrounds, carefully dithered colours and animated landscapes made by cycling a palette. His later work includes Thimbleweed Park.

Mark J. Ferrari is an illustrator, author and game artist whose backgrounds include Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, Loom and The Secret of Monkey Island. His own account dates his professional illustration work to 1987, when he illustrated S. Petersen’s Field Guide to Creatures of the Dreamlands for Chaosium and began working for Lucasfilm Games.1

Making sixteen colours do more

Computer Gaming World’s April 1991 profile describes Ferrari arriving at Lucasfilm with little computer experience. When he mixed EGA colours in patterns to suggest intermediate shades, the programmers initially objected that the resulting pictures would not compress well enough. Ferrari later recalled finishing Zak McKracken with solid colours, then using extensive dithering on Loom after the compression problem had been addressed.23

Loom’s designer Brian Moriarty described a separate artistic influence: Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and Eyvind Earle’s flat shapes and planes of colour. In a Retro Gamer interview, he credited Ferrari with adapting that look to the game’s sixteen-colour palette. The work involved composition and lighting as well as finding ways around a colour limit.4

Moving colours through a still picture

Palette cycling is different from dithering. An indexed image stores a palette entry for each pixel. Changing the colours assigned to those entries can make bands of light appear to move, even though the stored pixel indices stay in place. Ferrari’s landscapes arrange those bands into effects such as flowing water and rain. His explanation compares the illusion with a sequence of fixed lights that appears to travel along a sign.35

Ferrari used Deluxe Paint, including its gradients and stencils, to construct those patterns. He stressed that the image and palette had to be designed together: running a cycling routine over an arbitrary picture would not produce the same result. Some changes of weather or time of day also used extra image overlays, so “one completely unchanged image” is too broad a description of every scene.3

Later work and demonstrations

Programmer Joe Huckaby brought Ferrari’s older scenes into a browser through Canvas Cycle. Huckaby released the JavaScript renderer and conversion tools under the MIT licence, while explicitly excluding the demonstration artwork from that permission.5

Gary Winnick announced Ferrari’s arrival on Thimbleweed Park in June 2015, and the finished game’s credits list him for background art alongside Octavi Navarro. Ferrari’s GDC 2016 session covered both palette animation and his approach to contemporary art made to resemble older limited-colour games.67

See also

Sources

Footnotes

  1. Mark Ferrari, official biography, first-person career source. ↩

  2. “Bringing Imagination to Life”, Computer Gaming World 81, April 1991, pp. 63–64, contemporary profile and interview. ↩

  3. Mark Ferrari, “Q & A with Mark J. Ferrari”, hosted by Effect Games; explanations of dithering, Deluxe Paint, cycling and overlays. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Kim Wild, “The Making of Loom”, Retro Gamer 46, 2008, pp. 86–87, interview with Brian Moriarty. ↩

  5. Joe Huckaby, Canvas Cycle repository and technical explanation, including the distinction between the MIT-licensed code and copyrighted artwork. ↩ ↩2

  6. Gary Winnick, “Mark Ferrari Joins Team Thimbleweed”, 1 June 2015; Terrible Toybox, Thimbleweed Park credits. ↩

  7. GDC, “8 Bit & ‘8 Bitish’ Graphics—Outside the Box”, 2016 session record and abstract. ↩

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