Frank Force, who works online as KilledByAPixel, is a programmer, game developer, and generative artist based in Austin, Texas. He is known for size coding, the discipline of writing tiny JavaScript programs, sometimes only a few hundred bytes long, that generate visuals, games, and animations. In 2019 he won the Best Illusion of the Year contest with a shape that appears to shift its rotation depending on how it is viewed.
Force was born in Philadelphia and grew up in a nearby suburb, where his parents encouraged an early interest in art despite tight family finances. A family computer his father brought home in the late 1980s led him to write his first programs, with help from a family friend who taught him Visual Basic. In high school he began writing games on a TI-82 graphing calculator, including an original adventure game called Road Kill Dave that used nearly all of the device's memory. He studied computer science at the Rochester Institute of Technology, steering his coursework toward physics, math, and art classes in pursuit of a career in game development. He went on to work as a programmer at studios including Midway Games, Volition, and Rooster Teeth, contributing to games such as Psi-Ops and Red Faction: Guerrilla before settling in Austin.
