HEXdidn't... - A Pixel Art Odyssey

Thirty-odd posts in, it may not yet be clear why I've named this blog "A Pixel Art Odyssey ". After all, the word 'odyssey' normally implies a long, meandering journey beset by hardship , taken from the poem by Homer. It doesn't seem to be entirely applicable to the act of creating low-res sprites for games on the Spectrum or the SAM Coupé... But there are several reasons for that very deliberate choice. First and foremost, having started out in pixel art by drawing on paper (and I really must get round to posting some examples of my earliest work), I'm still not entirely comfortable creating pixel art directly on a computer, using a mouse, or any other input device. While I techncially now have over 35 years of experience in pixel art, there was quite a significant gap between my early efforts and my current period of work in that field, during which I wasn't really doing much due to full-time work commitments. That lack of practice meant that I almos...

The fact that Westen House is already a complete game - and that its assets are available via GitHub - is both a good thing and a bad thing for the purpose of conversion to another system. On the one hand, it meant that I could extract the MSX graphical assets from GitHub easily enough, and use them as a template for the SAM remix. This, in theory, saves an awful lot of time and effort, in that I could just follow the sizes and shapes already present, and just add more colour to bring everything up to SAM Coupé MODE 4 quality. On the other hand, it meant that I might end up constrained by the appearance of the MSX assets, and miss opportunities to take fuller advantage of MODE 4 on the SAM. The one thing I was intent on ensuring, for the SAM conversion, was that the basic scenery - the walls and floors - should no longer look like unfilled colour vector outlines over a black background. Beyond that, I was hoping it would be possible to vary the colour of the walls, floors, etc. to bet...