Ruben Tous

Retronator

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Ruben Tous
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      1. Retronator, Thursday, November 20, 2025
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        It’s not too often I get to write about a new old-school tool for making lo-fi graphics. Both because I haven’t written a news article in ages (sorry!), but also since everything today is either a mobile app, a cloud service, or powered by generative AI. Who am I kidding, it’s all 3 at once!

        Lester, developed by Ruben Tous, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, is a classic, offline program that fills you with nostalgia just as much as the beloved animation technique it’s built for. And I’m not just saying that because it has the ZX Spectrum palette built in!

        The algorithms packed in the tool speed up production significantly as all you have to do is click on the areas of the input video you want to create clusters for and it can propagate them to all future frames. The magic is all open-sourced and described in Ruben’s research article Rotoscope Animation through Video Object Segmentation and Tracking.

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        It takes a bunch of time to process the frames and the results aren’t (always) perfect, but I’d rather get some extra work done while it’s silently purring in the background and then clean up the base animation than manually color over each individual frame myself.

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        Good luck getting these 167 frames done by hand (although I do miss all the TV shows I managed to watch when doing repetitive tasks like that).

        If you’d like to add Lester to your own toolchain and stand next to classics such as Prince of Persia and Another World, get it here (free, macOS/Windows).

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      Retronator
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      Hello everyone, I am Matej Jan a.k.a. Retro. Welcome to Retronator—my blog and game development studio.

      I started Retronator in 2007 with the goal of making video games focused on creativity. Along the way I started writing about art and gaming, featuring artists and projects that caught my attention. Nowadays this mostly includes pixel art, with occasional diversions into voxels, low-poly 3D, low-res digital painting, and basically anything that makes me feel like a kid again (text adventures, chiptune, LEGO …).

      I'm also very nostalgic about 20th century games that didn't neglect their educational potential. I expected titles like Sim Ant, Caesar II, and Sim City to continue into the future, expanding their power to teach us something along the way. Games such as Kerbal Space Program and ECO continue to carry the torch, but are far in between in the current gaming landscape. Expect Retronator to cover more games like that in the future.

      Finally, on these pages I document my own journey as an illustrator and game developer. I'm working on an adventure game for learning how to draw called Pixel Art Academy. This newspaper lives in the game world and I'll make that quite obvious soon. Thanks to backers of the game and supporters on Patreon I can create this content full-time. Thank you for making this possible!

      It's been 10 years since I started this journey and there is no doubt the next 10 will be absolutely amazing. Stick around and I hope you will enjoy the ride.

      Happy pixeling,
      —Retro

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