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.
