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?

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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...

TLC #16 - In Conclusion...

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...

WH #2 - Sixteen Shades of Dread

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...

HEXdidn't... - A Pixel Art Odyssey

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