Skip to main content

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 Spectrum - 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 certainly seen screenshots with a more defined, saturated red in them, but the range of colours still isn't quite optimal. In Westen House, the protagonist's skin colour is the paler yellow... and while that might be suitable for the game's antagonists, it's not exactly ideal for the hero.

Nevertheless, I started out with, essentially, the MSX palette - or the nearest the SAM can manage - and then basically darkened it, then started tweaking some colours to achieve a better balance and a more adaptable range. It's not quite an optimised 16-colour palette, but it worked well enough when I started working on the sprites and scenery for the SAM conversion.

So, rather than two copies of black, I've added a super-dark blue, switched the purply-pink for an additional, darker shade of grey, replaced one shade of green with an additional shade in the red/skintone range, and then used a darker cyan. The main aim is that it's sufficiently dark to make the house - and, more importantly, the crypt below the house - seem as dark and foreboding as possible while still retaining some colour. That said, I have to confess that I first toyed with the idea of making the game mostly greyscale, with a classic, black-and-white horror movie vibe, before deciding that not only would that not do the game justice, it just wouldn't be practical, because many of the items are coloured out of necessity, if not precisely colour-coded.

On top of this, I was determined to ensure that the protagonist had a more natural skin colour, and those same colours could (just about) stretch to covering 'wood' as well. Two shades of grey, plus the deliberately flat 'yellow' shades were ideal for stonework. Furthermore, it quickly became apparent that I could even extend this into the blues to achieve an even wider graduation. Initially, I experimented with replacing white with a pale cyan, but that ended up looking strange, and made it that much more difficult to recolour certain in-game objects in a pleasing way.

It did occur to me that the colours in slots #4 and #5 - the darkest shades of cyan and green, respectively, that are available on the SAM - are very similar in appearance, so #4 is tentatively reserved for another palette swap, should it prove beneficial at some later point in development.

Once I had completed a first draft of the scenery and sprites, I had a go at making the palette even darker, as an experiment... though this ended up affecting only the colours in slots #7 to #15:

While this works wonders for the scenery, particularly the wooden objects, it's less optimal for the protagonist sprite - who looked very red in the face rather than as if he was in a dimmer environment - and certain collectable items. The candles, in particular, look terrible without a clean white as their highlight.

It's possible that I could request a unique palette for the UI, at the bottom of the screen, and make use of at least some of these colours for the game window only... but that's a question for another time. For the moment, my first palette will remain in play. As one of my first truly custom-made palettes, I'm pretty happy with it, and look forward to seeing what the converted game engine will display.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more