Another Blog? Seriously?

I've been kicking around the idea of starting a new blog for quite a while. Back in 2021, while working on The Lower Caverns for the SAM Coupé, it occurred to me that it might have been worth documenting the project. I first got involved with TLC back in the summer of 2018 and, by 2021, thought it was almost done. With that in mind, I decided I could document the project as a retrospective, and set to work.

However, due to the programmer's real-life commitments (and in no small part due to my persistent dissatisfaction with anything I produce), the game wasn't completed until near the end of 2023, and I wasn't able to complete my 'retrospective' till a few months into 2024.

Now, however, the game is complete, and due to be published with issue 27 or 28 of SAM Revival magazine from Quazar. Having put all the effort in, I'm finally going to take the plunge and publish the retrospective, while also using this new Blog to blather on about other projects I have on the go, on the back burner, or just beginning to coalesce in my mind.

I might even thrown in a few bits and bobs about Ren'Py, since I'm attempting to learn the system and develop some visual novels along the way.

Let's see how this works out, shall we?

Comments

WH #5 - It's Not A Bug, It's A Feature

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...

WH #3 - Heroes and Villains

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...

TLC #4 - Willy or Won't-y?

In the original version of Manic Miner for the SAM Coupé, the Miner Willy sprite has only 4 frames of animation, just like the Spectrum version. Of the later-generation versions of Manic Miner , those that did more than just duplicate the Spectrum graphics without attribute clash upgraded the player sprite to a whopping 8 frames, allowing for a smoother, more convincing swing of his arms, both forward and back. I didn't initially plan on completely overhauling how the player sprite worked, and we were perhaps two months into the project before I even started dabbling. To my mind, improving the SAM version required increasing the number of animation frames, because my improvements to the sprite made it a little bit too obvious that his arms only moved in one direction, then magically popped back to their opposite positions. But my primary concern from the start was the overall look of the sprite and its poor usage of MODE 4. On the existing sprite, Willy's headgear is all...

HEXdidn't... - A Pixel Art Odyssey

Search This Blog