HEXdidn't... - A Pixel Art Odyssey

Thirty-odd posts in, it may not yet be clear why I've named this blog "A Pixel Art Odyssey ". After all, the word 'odyssey' normally implies a long, meandering journey beset by hardship , taken from the poem by Homer. It doesn't seem to be entirely applicable to the act of creating low-res sprites for games on the Spectrum or the SAM Coupé... But there are several reasons for that very deliberate choice. First and foremost, having started out in pixel art by drawing on paper (and I really must get round to posting some examples of my earliest work), I'm still not entirely comfortable creating pixel art directly on a computer, using a mouse, or any other input device. While I techncially now have over 35 years of experience in pixel art, there was quite a significant gap between my early efforts and my current period of work in that field, during which I wasn't really doing much due to full-time work commitments. That lack of practice meant that I almos...

The fact that Westen House is already a complete game - and that its assets are available via GitHub - is both a good thing and a bad thing for the purpose of conversion to another system. On the one hand, it meant that I could extract the MSX graphical assets from GitHub easily enough, and use them as a template for the SAM remix. This, in theory, saves an awful lot of time and effort, in that I could just follow the sizes and shapes already present, and just add more colour to bring everything up to SAM Coupé MODE 4 quality. On the other hand, it meant that I might end up constrained by the appearance of the MSX assets, and miss opportunities to take fuller advantage of MODE 4 on the SAM. The one thing I was intent on ensuring, for the SAM conversion, was that the basic scenery - the walls and floors - should no longer look like unfilled colour vector outlines over a black background. Beyond that, I was hoping it would be possible to vary the colour of the walls, floors, etc. to bet...

While much of Westen House on the MSX runs in that machine's equivalent of MODE 2 on the SAM Coupé, using MODE 2 in the SAM conversion would result in less colourful sprites and significant attribute clash, because the SAM lacks the MSX's ability to overlay sprites, effectively on a dedicated layer, separate from the background and entirely without clash. It'd look better than an equivalent conversion to the ZX Spectrum, but probably not by much . From left to right, we have Professor Edward Kelvin (the player character), Arthur Holmwood, Dr. John Seward and Lucy Westen: The above appear to be single sprites, but they are actually several different sprites overlaid on each other to give the impression of individual, multi-colour sprites. It's similar to a trick I've seen used on the Commodore 64 (not least in Reckless Rufus ) where high-colour mode is used for the base sprites and the tiles, but then high resolution mode is used as an overlay...

The graphics in the original version of Reckless Rufus were a joint effort by Mike Berry, Roy Fielding and David Green, and a very clever trick was used to get around the low-res appearance of the C64's high-colour mode. Essentially, each sprite is made up of two sprite layers: one sets down the colours according to the 160 x 200 resolution, the other overlays a high resolution monochrome outline, according to the 320 x 200 pixel resolution, to make it appear sharper. The same trick was used in several other C64 games, perhaps the most widely known being the highly stylised conversion of Target; Renegade . Rufus himself is a comparatively large (22 x 21 pixel) green blob with two flat feet, two big, round eyes, a bobbly nose, and a cheeky smirk. I'm not normally a fan of C64 graphics, but there's certainly something engaging about this cheeky stowaway. Weirdly, the animation of his vertical roll has fewer frames of animation than his...

Given that Westen House is essentially a horror game - albeit with a fairly simple,  cartoonish style for its sprites - one thing I definitely wanted to change was palette. The MSX's Mode 2 screen has a fixed palette of 16 colours that is somehow both bright and washed out, offering very little contrast between its shades. It also - like the ZX Spectru m - has two copies of black, even though - unlike MODE 2 on the SAM - it doesn't split the palette into two sets of 8 colours each, accessed by applying either BRIGHT 0 or BRIGHT 1 to PEN and PAPER slots #0 to #7. On the whole, it really doesn't seem like a particularly useful palette. Three shades of green, three shades of red/orange, two shades of blue, yellow and white/grey, cyan and a purply-pink on their own, and then those two instances of black. Bearing in mind the above is the MSX palette according to Multipaint , and not necessarily perfectly representative of what you'd see on actual hardware. I've certain...

The Lower Caverns certainly took longer to develop than I'd expected. We began in July of 2018, exhibited the latest work-in-progress builds at RetCon each subsequent year (bar 2020, where the event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic), and it felt tantalisingly close to being done for well over a year before we actually finished the playtesting and tweaking. A combination of real-life tribulations, illnesses, injuries and responsibilities artificially extended the development period. Unfortunately for the coder, this had the side effect of giving me perhaps a little too much time to second-guess myself and nit-pick almost everything I had created for the game. There had been a few times during the process where, once a set of new graphics was incorporated into the game, I found fault with the very next build, and supplied amendments immediately. This occasionally led to confusion over which disk image file was the latest, since I neglected to date stamp them for the fir...