In all honesty, I’d sooner use half-decent graphics made by one of the forum members than good graphics from a ‘free graphics’ website.
As I’ve said before, I feel it gives the game more character when the graphics and characters are original.
If you see the same graphics popping up in lots of different games then they start to look a bit ‘generic’.
I agree. It would be silly to pick out a load of nice graphics and discover that it doesn’t look as good as you were hoping (e.g. it looks squashed, it’s hard to play because you can’t see much of the level etc).
This is one of my concerns as well.
:P
The E isn’t capitalised by the way, it’s just “Tiled”.
I was assuming we were just going to add colour and increase the tile size to begin with.
But if we’re adding things like parallax scrolling then I’m beginning to question what the actual scope of this project is.
It’s starting to sound like people are already skipping ahead to the ‘sequel’ idea.
Also, I think we should start arguing over a code style if there’s going to be more than one programmer.
Experience has taught me that without a code style or a person to dictate the code style, you end up with people writing in different styles and the code starts to get messy and confusing.
For the record, whatever happens I’ll at least be available to provide advice and suggestions for this,
but I’m not sure how much of the programming I’ll end up doing.
I just thought out some ugly code to make the test.
Now even increasing the number of enemies sprites, performance are still good at 30FPS firmware.bin (225.5 KB)
There are 2 parallax and the image in the background is bigger than the screen. Basically I’m blitting to the frambuffer 3 complete screens (not portions, just big transparent images) and about 10 sprites (about 50*60).
So really un-optimized. 2d platformer logic can be keep very basic.
I’m comfortable in saying Pokitto can handle this kind of graphic.
Music can be streamed from SD card without high cpu consumption from my experience with Abbayes porting. Keep in mind quality will be quite low 8-12kHz so a good equalization and compression will help to the final result. (somthing we didn’t do in Abbayes, we simply converter the ogg original music with Audacity from what I know)
[quote=“Pharap, post:30, topic:1506”]
I’d sooner use half-decent graphics made by one of the forum members than good graphics from a ‘free graphics’ website.
Even if I understand your point of view, I believe high-level graphics can really boost the final result. Only drawback is the difficulty on keeping such high standard.
Even here I’m not totally agree.
I know this will be quite unpopular and discorded with the most of suggestion you can find out there.
But really make sense build the perfect gameplay and game engine and then left the work half finished because there’s no good assets to use?
I’ve found that starting from good resources boost the hype and push to complete the work more than some flat placeholder. At least for me.
I am partially with you on most of what you say. Good graphics will build up the hype for sure, but I saw so many times great looking demo never turns into a complete game.
And I do like Castlevania-like games, maybe too much. What we should think about though, take make this stand out is of 1 thing that this game could do different than all the others out there.
For exemple in Aria of sorrow, players could harvest some powers/moves from some defeated monsters.
Maybe it’s just something like a shape shifting character? Maybe we are a rebel werewolf? Human by day and werewolf by night?
S ok me part of levels could open up just when you have the right shape so that would make dynamic level design possible?
I’m not against having good graphics, but I think it makes sense to have them tailored to the game rather than trying to find ‘off-the-peg’ stuff that’s suitable because you could end up trying to fit the game around the graphics instead of fitting the graphics to the game.
Focusing on the gameplay before the graphics hasn’t harmed Pokitto Grand Prix.
I find the opposite.
Like @Vampirics said, you end up with an immaculate demo that never becomes playable.
Also people get so attached to the graphics that they become afraid to discard them if it becomes apparent that the graphics aren’t suitable.
Also can someone confirm whether we’re still talking about just upgrading CastleBoy or actually talking about making a new game?
All this talk of new levels and new monsters makes me think we’re creeping into new game territory.
If that’s the case I might have to back out of this one.
I was expecting a simple case of replacing the sprites with slightly larger colour versions of the original sprites and scaling up the tiles, which would have taken a few days.
I’m pledged to too much else already to get involved in developing a new game from scratch.
I think I might do, but possibly not at the moment.
I think for now I need to focus on clearing my project backlog a bit, and if there’s going to be a team working on a sort of sequel then the demand for a colour remake isn’t going to be that high.
I wasn’t really expecting a whole team to begin with, I was expecting one or two people offering to contribute graphics and maybe a programmer or two.
I think this thread is about the ‘new’ CastleBoy. We still have the thread about the CastleBoy port here. The two projects are definitively different. Most likely the port will come much before the ‘new’ so I think it’s still worth having it.
Concerning the discussion about gameplay vs graphics. There are no right answer and any approach to game development is valid. However I don’t think that just throwing nice assets makes a game visually appealing. For me visually a game should be consistent, graphics should serve the gameplay and gives clear information to the player.
Also one thing that is very often forgotten is what is commonly called ‘game feel’. This is basically the loop between the controls and the visual feedback (animations, particles, screen shakes, …). This is something that you generally don’t notice, but if it’s not done properly you feel that something is wrong.
In the same way, having a working game with placeholders that people can play, can hype and push to complete the work. But again no right answers.
This could lead to a game that is less about platforms (even no platforms), but more about moving on a flat space and and doing combat. It’s quite interesting.
On my side for fun I hacked some Super Castlevania 4 sprites into my current engine. The engine is for an horizontal shooter so I had to stretch a bit. The demo uses mode 15. Player is 32x48, tiles are 16x16. You can move, jump and duck. This is more traditional old-school style Castlevania.
Due to lag it’s capped to 30 FPS. The game slows down when too many tiles are displayed. I did not spend time optimizing it but though it would still be interesting to share. Once thing I noticed: The biggest constraint is the number of colors! There are only 15 colors that can be used (1 for transparency).
I like what you have so far. The control are already feeling great. But yeah I can see it getting slow when there’s more things on the screen.
We really might have to edit the sprites too make it look more original. It does look great on the screen as it is. Colours… That we might have to rely on multiple colour palettes. Maybe 1 per level, so that we can have varied levels?
Yes definitively. Or something like first 6 colors are for player, next 9 colors are for level/enemy. By the way thanks for being brave enough to run my bin
For compilation I used the tutorial’s toolchains. So CodeBlocks on Windows (a lot) then EmBitz for generating the bin. My asset pipeline is hackish for now. I use poki-imconvert for sprites and a ruby script (hacked from CastleBoy) to generate map data from Tiled maps in JSON. I have a small engine that handle the rendering of tilemaps, animations and collisions. All it does is call Pokitto’s drawBitmapData for rendering.
