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.,
While dealing with depression in 2008, Force discovered nonrepresentational abstract art, studying artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee and producing a body of physical work in sharpie and acrylic paint. He came to realize that he had already been making generative art throughout his programming career, through the visual effects and interactive simulations he built for video games.He created the open source LittleJS game engine and the ZzFX sound effect generator, and has published more than 1,000 tiny JavaScript demos.
One of his size-coded pieces, City in a Bottle, packs a tiny ray caster that renders an endlessly scrolling cityscape into just 256 bytes of JavaScript.He has also hosted online game jams for his LittleJS engine and entered size-coding competitions, including a 13-kilobyte, Outrun-inspired racing game with procedurally generated visual assets.,In 2022 he released Divide by Circle on fxhash, an experiment in subdividing cubes around a circle built with JavaScript and Three.js, followed by Chaosplot the same year.This followed years as an early adopter of fx(hash), where, in his own account, he released some of his best work early in the platform's history.
