@dir3kt , would be good if you could pitch in with an opinion where you’d like to see this head towards
I like the idea of scv 4 - style 3 layer parallax, big sprites
1 Like
You can just go for something in between, or take a 16x16 and cut it down a bit.
Or take the existing tileset and just scale it up slightly, adding a splash of colour:
(I know it doesn’t look as impressive as some of the other suggestions so far, but I made it myself at least. :P)
There are a few good 12x12 tilesets out there:
Ukiyo-e:
Hrm, now where have you heard this term before? :P
Or the more traditional sumi-e:
1 Like
I can participate too. I only have time for one main hobby project, which is PGP currently, but I can occasionally help and implement features to Castleboy.
I am still not convinced that we can manage only with free graphics. I would be better to have an artist in our team, and a level designer too (I am terrible at designing levels).
2 Likes
Personally I would start from a rip of SCV4 sprites. I think it’s more important to first implement the gameplay to make sure everything works fine in terms of object size, etc… then focus on backgrounds and juice. Just my opinion though.
2 Likes
I also have a little Pokitto project currently. But I can also give my hand at Super CastleBoy. Good point about level design, it’s very important and most of time undervalued or left for the end. Making games is not only about coding and pixelling skills. I can do game/level design so this is maybe a skill I could bring to the team.
About the arts, yes a dedicated pixel artist is pretty much needed otherwise the game will not look consistent. I asked the original artist of CastleBoy but he is not replying.
1 Like
That last demo you made is doing weird. I am wondering if it’s just me but it seems that this demo is skipping the bootloader sequence. Once flashed my pokitto can’t get to the bootloader, it just goes to the demo directly.
Did you curse the demo or something? Lol 
1 Like
Sorry @Vampirics probably I’ve just deploy with developer mode on. Please take another bin an put it on Pokitto via Usb. That will fix it.
1 Like
No worries, I knew I only had to reflash with something else. These pokitto can’t be bricked anyway.
So we know it can look good. Question is can it run smooth with all that part parralax scrolling and everything else happening…
If we know for sure the tile size and colour palette I am sure an pixel artist or anyone else might start to work on tiles.
About level design, I guess we might need some level creator tool to make the process faster. I am used to just using an Excel file for that but it doesn’t give you a nice graphical preview, and that could help a lot.
And there is the sounds… As far as music goes, if we can use .wav or mp3 in some ways I could probably provide an acoustic guitar soundtrack or at least some kind of musical ambiance lol.
2 Likes
For the level design we can use TilEd, a flexible map editor. It can output XML or JSON files which are very easy to parse into a .h with byte data. This is the approach I used for CastleBoy, I created a small tool to convert my tilEd files into a .h with static map data (tiles) and entity data (position and type of each entity). The game engine would then display the tilemap directly from the flash the static map data and use the entity data to instantiate the entities in RAM. It worked very well.
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 really need to clear some of my backlog.
1 Like
want to try 3D animation? it be a allot faster to get all those animations together
can still be refined by hand ofcource
5 Likes
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.
2 Likes
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?
Just ideas…
3 Likes
In native resolution? Sounds very promising to me!
3 Likes
In PGP, 8 kHz simple audio decreased fps about 10 %.
2 Likes
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.
1 Like
Sounds like a new game to me so far. Which is not a bad idea I think.
1 Like
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 if you think that would take a few days we should still do it as a side project maybe? I can help in colouring tiles and stuff like that.
I just don’t think we need a whole team working on it.
1 Like
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.