App turns your screen into Mario - Bye work
- Published
Planning on getting some work done? Don't read on.
Someone's developed an app that turns your screen into an old-school Mario level.
It's still in the developmental stage though, so right now you'll have to do a bit of leg work to get it working.
If you can though, by golly, you're in for a treat.
Check out the video below.
The programme is the brainchild of Aaron Randall, who made it as an experiment.
Aaron told Newsbeat: "The idea came from a conversation with a friend at work - he spends a bunch of his time staring at graphs which monitor our servers, and I joked with him that one day I'd build an app that he could overlay on those graphs to turn them into something more interesting to look at (while still maintaining their use as graphs).
"A few weeks later we had a hackday at the Songkick office where I work (a hackday is where everyone spends the day working on anything they like), and I cobbled something together that eventually became 'Screentendo'."
How does it work? There's a very (and we mean very) in depth description on his blog, but it basically takes a screenshot, and processes the image several times until only big blocks of black and white are left, each ten by ten pixels.
These black and white squares are converted into zeros and ones in a table, which in turn is used to generate blocks in the game.
Hey presto, you're ready to go.
It takes a while to load. It takes ages to process the image. You need to be able to programme just to run it and it only works on OS X - so no PC or mobile for now.
So why are we even writing about it? Because we really, really hope that if it gets enough attention, Aaron will finish the project. Because that will be good. And no work will ever be done again. Ever. By anyone.
And there's a chance. Aaron told Newsbeat: "I'd love to release a compiled version of the app at some point, but there's plenty of work to do to get to that point.
"The image processing step is pretty slow at the moment, so for larger images it can take a long time to convert the image into a playable level. Also the game physics is quite clunky.
"When I fix these, I'd love to look at porting to other platforms."
It should be noted, Screentendo is absolutely not an official Nintendo or Super Mario product. Just to be clear...
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