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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 to sharpen up the appearance of the sprites)

However, since we were intending to use MODE 4 for all the graphics, that meant I could make full use of the 16 colours available to that screen mode, and try to add some subtle shading to the sprites. The protagonist, Edward Kelvin, was easy enough, and I'd made sure to include a decent skin tone for just that purpose... but I wanted to make the antagonists look discernibly different. Thankfully, the available colours allowed for a suitably ashen complexion without limiting what I could do with their clothing and hair. Since the original version of Arthur has the pretty much the same colour jacket as Ed, I decided to make his grey, while John retains his white coat, as I felt it appropriate for him to have a sort of 'lab coat' look, but I did change his hair colour, so he doesn't appear to be an old-age pensioner.

One other alteration I made was to the position of the characters' heads in their downward diagonal animations. The heads on the original MSX sprites appeared to be a little too far back on the shoulders in those animations, so they didn't seem to fit with the look of the other directions. Moving the heads just 1 pixel 'forward' corrected this, so I applied that to both Ed and Lucy:

Looking at the Ed sprite animated, I'm tempted to go back and try to squeeze in some shoulder movement, as he looks far too stiff in his upper body. Lucy's dress also needs a bit more attention, as the leg movements don't look quite natural, and the hem of the dress in the bottom right corner of the sprite barely moves. I'm almost glad that Arthur and John aren't animated, as that would mean even more work... Though I might make further tweaks to both of them as well...

Aside from the creatures lurking about Westen House, which I'll deal with separately, this is pretty much all there is to the game in terms of sprites - three frames of animation for each direction of movement for both Ed and Lucy, but the latter only ever moves in two directions.

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