Crush my dreams: How impossible is this style on nes hardware?

BlueyLewis

New member
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Couple places where I brake the 4 color/tile rule. Specifically:
- The character, which I'm not crazy about any way
- The sun is like 7 or 8 colors
- The rounded corners and slanted floor, which include 4 colors + transparency

But everything is 4 frames of animation. And I 'cheat' there a little bit to save space, which it's really only 1 tile, rearranged a bit for each animation frame.
 

chronosv2

New member
Honestly, I don't think your dreams need to be "crushed" at all -- this could easily be scaled back to 3 colors + Transparency and it should work fine. The only limitation I see it bumping into the 4 background palette limit, but that just means, really, that the number of colors in use (you get 12 total, 13 if you count the background color which I would assume in this case is the sky color) need to be scaled back. I have absolutely no idea if you'd be able to keep the animation -- that would take a lot of space in the tile banks, I'd imagine.

Gorgeous, highly stylized art, by the way. I'd love to see you make the attempt at making something with this style running on the NES!

Edit: Yeah, looked at it again and counting the sun you definitely go over the palette limit.
 

BlueyLewis

New member
Thanks for the feedback. Once they implement animated tiles I'll try to cut these colors back a bit. Forgot about the palette limit. Rip. Here's an alternate sun that I think adheres to the rules better.
YhV2Avi.gif



Right now I'm thinking to cut down on colors I could remove black from the grass, and fill it with the darkest green tone. As well as remove the black outline around the character. There's also a highlight color in the grass that I could probably do away with.
 

chronosv2

New member
Maybe it's just me, but I actually like coming up with grand ideas and scaling them back for the platform. There's a project I've been concepting and I had a whole bunch of weapons planned for it but then realized "Wait... the NES can't handle all that." So I thought about how I could pull it back into manageable territory.

The new sun looks pretty nice. Do the parts of it fit inside 16x16 tiles? That's one other thing I didn't mention, but I wasn't planning on going in and subdividing your image to check.
You could help with the palette limit by maybe sharing the colors of the sun with those of the bridge... or somehow use other colors you're using to make the bridge. But I was thinking the darker colors used in the sun could make the bridge, though admittedly the bridge would look a little red.
 

BlueyLewis

New member
Sharing bridge palette with the sun palette is a good idea!

This sun is actually huge, like bigger than 48*48, but I'm going to redraw it smaller. Also the image up above originally used all 16*16 tiles. The cloud and the character don't quite adhere to that though. Image was originally built on a 256*240 canvas, and then blown up to 4 times that size to make it easier to see.
 

Fizzy

New member
I love this. Reminds me of Yoshi's Island.
Maybe you could squeeze all these tiles just enough to make everything animated. I'd love to see it in action.
With clever use of color and palettes, colors shouldn't be a problem and it'd look almost as nicely as this is.
 

Mihoshi20

Member
It would require adaption for sure and the implementation of animated tiles in the engine, but I don't see why it's not possible. You didn't see many NES games with that many animated tiles so I'm not sure how well the 1.79 MHz processor would handle it. You'd also severely limit the number of tiles you'd have at your disposal as so many would be used as frames from the animation but I don't see why you couldn't have a game like that.

Maybe someone will chime in who knows the hardware better and confirm or refute the possibility. I really like the style though and animated or not would love to see something like it made.
 
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