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