HEXdidn't... - A Pixel Art Odyssey

One thing common to the SAM Coupé games I've thusfar been involved with is a certain... haphazard quality to the development. My experience with 'professional' game development is admittedly limited (high school Work Experience and one published game more than 30 years ago, working by phone/post with a freelance coder), but it's easy enough to see when things are happening (or not happening) because something hasn't been fully thought through or discussed with all parties involved. Something I've been guilty of in the past is raising a hypothetical, then driving ahead with designing sprites, etc. based around that hypothetical , without having first adequately confirmed that it would ever be anything but hypothetical. For example, I mentioned in my first post about the sprites in The Lower Caverns , that I produced about 2/3 of a screen's worth of new and unique sprites before the coder pointed out that all he'd really wanted was for the existing sprite...

Continuing on the subject of things I really dislike when creating pixel art, we come to the things creeping and crawling around in Westen House , presenting the action-oriented  aspect of the game's challenge: In theory , a group of two-frame animations is nothing special and, in fact, for three out of these four creatures, it's no problem at all. The rats work well enough, the bats look pretty cute, and the blobs are kinda funny. The spiders - at least, I'm assuming that's what they're supposed to be - are pretty confusing, though. The bobbing cephalothorax on a static abdomen and legs that basically just go up and down get rather lost, because they're monochrome and only a single pixel wide, with weird angles in their joints. I realise it's very difficult to animate something that size - particularly something as complex as a spider - but it's hard to recolour something if you don't understand what yo...

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...