Hi,
Here’s some in game mockup’s for anew Spectrum Next game I’m working on. Made mostly in Aseprite (but also use PhotoShop and Tiled along the way).
The Next is kind of like working on something in-between and MegaDrive and a SNES. It uses the same MegaDrive colour palette (RGB333 - so each colour range has 8 steps from 0 - 255), but can have unto 512 colours on screen at once (using a tile map mode (256 colours) and a sprite mode (another 256 colours). Also, like the 16bit consoles, you have limited video ram, so you need to be creative using what’s available (which makes it a look more interesting and fun to work on).
Anyway, here’s some mockups using real in game gf/xs. Hope you like it.
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Love the style, and quality of pixel art, BadBumble!
Thanks. There’s months of work gone into it so far and it’s only about 10-20% done for the gf/x I think.
It’s so much fun thou and it keeps me off the streets =)
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I really like the brown stone texture in the top right image but I think the background is a little out of tune.
I mean the gray background uses square slabs, I think that doesn’t fit well with the foreground texture (the brown stones).
Thanks. That was due to running out of tiles for that level. The background is made up of 8* pixel tiles on the Next and you are limited to 432 of them (but you can flip / rotate them) and I used most of them up so the easiest way to get a bit of detail was to draw edge tiles to give the sense of blocks in the background. I originally set out for it to be a cleaner, simpler style and it ended up using more tiles than the other levels.
All the other levels use the same tile sets for the foreground and background, but use a different palette for them (same for the shadows - just a darker palette and I have to make a few tiles for the shadow angle).
ahahahaha
cute artwork！Looking forward to the release of your game, I must buy it!
Let me just start by clarifying that this is great art for any platform. But, for a Spectrum? This is absolutely mind boggling! Can the Spectrum Next really handle all those colors at once? Actually, how many colors is on each palette on average?
Anyway, great job! The character reminds me of Indiana Jones+Wario! Lol
Thanks. Started off as a Rick Dangerous / Fred / Monster land thing and just went from there.
The Next is really good. It’s got a palette of 512 colours (same as MegaDrive), but can display in theory unto 512 colours (256 for the sprites and 256 for the tilemaps / backgrounds), but saying that, the Next doesn’t have enough memory to really make a game like that, so you end up making mini palettes of 16 colours (so you have 16 different palettes for the sprites and another 16 palettes of 16 colours for the tiles).
The tile maps use at most 4 palettes of 16 and the sprites each have their own palette of 16 colours that can be swapped around. Most sprite only have around 8 colours in each so I can have two different things on screen sharing the same palette. To be honest, for readability, it’s works out better most of the time to use less colours.