HEXdidn't... - A Pixel Art Odyssey

The explosion of AI into the homebrew scene has had mixed results, to say the least . On the one hand, the 'democratisation of art' argument says that developing games is no longer the sole domain of the technically accomplished coder, or those with the patience and persistence to learn one of the many game development systems (Unity, Godot, RPG Maker, Adventure Game Studio, Ren'Py, Scorpion Engine... to name a handful off the top of my head). Some of these are even made available for free, to encourage development of new homebrew games. But now, one can 'vibe code' an entire game, create assets 'for free' within another AI framework, obtain AI-generated music and sound effects, etc. all without experience or expertise in any field other than describing an idea , and in a fraction of the time it would take a dedicated team of produce. On the other hand... this very freedom and accessibility has led to an explosion of (I'm going to try very hard to avoid...

One thing common to the SAM Coupé games I've thusfar been involved with is a certain... haphazard quality to the development. My experience with 'professional' game development is admittedly limited (high school Work Experience and one published game more than 30 years ago, working by phone/post with a freelance coder), but it's easy enough to see when things are happening (or not happening) because something hasn't been fully thought through or discussed with all parties involved. Something I've been guilty of in the past is raising a hypothetical, then driving ahead with designing sprites, etc. based around that hypothetical , without having first adequately confirmed that it would ever be anything but hypothetical. For example, I mentioned in my first post about the sprites in The Lower Caverns , that I produced about 2/3 of a screen's worth of new and unique sprites before the coder pointed out that all he'd really wanted was for the existing sprite...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Given that some of the highest-profile games on the SAM also appeared on every other contemporary computer format - often both 8- and 16-bit - it should come as no surprise that my early days with the machine were spent hoping for SAM conversions of all manner of popular, big name games. Toward the end of its life, hugely influential games like Prince of Persia and Lemmings were converted, essentially as homebrews, and then published by software companies who were no doubt happy they they hadn't been required to invest in development . In the years since I first joined the SAM Coupé scene, and particularly after joining the Greenford Computer Club, back in 2019, I've been fascinated by other retro computers, such as the Atari 800XL, the Enterprise, and the MSX. The latter I'd had previous experience of via emulating games such as SD Snatcher , Metal Gear , and the Gradius series, but I hadn't realised that it, much like the SAM Coupé, st...