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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.

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