My art showcase (Character Portraits - April 03)

A place for your artistic side. Discuss techniques and tools for pixel art on the NES, GBC, or similar platforms.

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ptoing
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Re: My art showcase (Megaman mockup updated)

Post by ptoing »

ccovell: I know exactly what does and what does not work. There are 4 tile palettes now and one of them is what tepples stated. 2 reds, teal and black. If you scroll up and get that .sav I made for tepples editor you can actually have a look at it and see that it works.

Update with new knight:
Image

And something completely different:
Image
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08--n7r6-7984
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Re: My art showcase (Megaman mockup updated)

Post by 08--n7r6-7984 »

ptoing wrote:ccovell: I know exactly what does and what does not work. There are 4 tile palettes now and one of them is what tepples stated. 2 reds, teal and black. If you scroll up and get that .sav I made for tepples editor you can actually have a look at it and see that it works.

Update with new knight:
Image

And something completely different:
Image
Your works and style are amazing! Especially given that it is created with all nes restrictions. Also, Blue Knight looks more interesting imo.
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tokumaru
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Re: My art showcase (Megaman mockup updated)

Post by tokumaru »

08--n7r6-7984 wrote:Blue Knight looks more interesting imo.
I prefer the bronze knight.
ptoing
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Re: My art showcase (Small update and some new stuff)

Post by ptoing »

Thanks :)

I mainly made him orange to stand out more. If this was to be a proper game I would probably change player colour on a per level basis, slightly anyway, to go with the atmosphere. Also how well he reads would also have to be tested on fullscreen NTSC with emulation or real CRT.
Sik
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Re: Hello, and some art. (mockup updated)

Post by Sik »

Oi, replying to old post (didn't check the forum in a while it seems).
ptoing wrote:EDIT:
Image

And old mockup I made, changed it to the NTSC colours. Should confirm to limitations. 3 tile palettes, 2 sprite palettes.
Something must be wrong with me, because I only see two tilemap palettes (the one with orange shades for the foreground and the one with blue shades for the background). Which palette am I missing?

EDIT: just saw it... that 8-pixel wide staircase =S (stupid 16×16 boundary limitation)
ptoing
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Re: My art showcase (Small update and some new stuff)

Post by ptoing »

Because of the 16x16 thing it needs a palette with the sky colour and the 2 oranges for the ladder.
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infiniteneslives
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Re: My art showcase (Small update and some new stuff)

Post by infiniteneslives »

Yeah but there are some ways to get around that, or make better use of the third palette.

Using sprites or a double wide latter would cut down to two palettes.

Even better might be to keep the third palette and use that palette more often in the 'sky-surface' transition areas. The dark brown patterning would have to move out of those immediate areas of course. But you could round off in the corners and vertical ridging of the ladders and such. Doesn't work everywhere as the background isn't always white. But areas where it was made white could add to the detail and make better use of the palette instead of only for the ladders.
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
ptoing
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Re: My art showcase (Small update and some new stuff)

Post by ptoing »

True. Though I made this quite a few years back, did not really think about restrictions and effective use that much. It has more 8x8 tiles than my knight mockup as well.
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infiniteneslives
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Re: My art showcase (Small update and some new stuff)

Post by infiniteneslives »

ptoing wrote:It has more 8x8 tiles than my knight mockup as well.
Yeah 55 Tiles is extremely impressive for all that detail. Honestly if you're creating something that'd be desirable for a homebrew I'd say make use of as many of the 256 tiles in a pattern table as you'd like for a given level/scene. The only reason to limit total tiles in a game is if you're using CHR-ROM, but CHR-RAM is the clear choice for a larger than NROM homebrew. Even if it's just UxROM. Only thing worth leaving room for is an HUD, maybe 30-50 tiles or less? Since it's RAM you wouldn't even need to store the entire alphanumeric alphabet, just use a tile per character.

Pattern tables compressed into PRG-ROM are relatively cheap. I'd go as far as to say they can be made effectively free in many cases.

My point is, feel free to use up the majority of a PT for a scene! :) If you're not using them, they're effectively being wasted IMO.
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
ptoing
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Re: My art showcase (Small update and some new stuff)

Post by ptoing »

Yeah totally. My current tilecount on the lastes knight one (not posted yet) is 99 tiles. I think the one with the statue is close to that, but I also killed 2 unnecessary tiles which are almost the same which slipped by earlier.

And of course I will use most of the 256 tiles in the end :D Want it to look as good as I can make it look.
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Bregalad
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Re: My art showcase (Small update and some new stuff)

Post by Bregalad »

The only reason to limit total tiles in a game is if you're using CHR-ROM [...]
You'd also want to limit tile usage if you have textboxes poping up in the playfield. If texboxes using both japanese katakana and hiragana show up, close to 128 tiles could be used only for that, leaving only 128 tiles for background graphics.
Shiru
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Re: My art showcase (Small update and some new stuff)

Post by Shiru »

HUD and text boxes always could be done as raster split with CHR bank switch at certain scanlines. Not too good with 8K CHR RAM, though, as there are only two banks, so HUD will either take space from background tileset or sprite tileset.
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infiniteneslives
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Re: My art showcase (Small update and some new stuff)

Post by infiniteneslives »

ptoing wrote:And of course I will use most of the 256 tiles in the end :D Want it to look as good as I can make it look.
Glad to hear it!
Bregalad wrote:If texboxes using both japanese katakana and hiragana show up, close to 128 tiles could be used only for that, leaving only 128 tiles for background graphics.
That'd be a horrible waste if ptoing was to operate with half the tiles to have Japanese text. Even if japanese were desired you could do as I said previously:
Since it's RAM you wouldn't even need to store the entire alphanumeric alphabet, just use a tile per character.
Or just black out the background while displaying large japanese texts, don't limit graphical art of this high quality.

Shiru wrote:Not too good with 8K CHR RAM, though, as there are only two banks, so HUD will either take space from background tileset or sprite tileset.
Pretty easy/free to have >8KB of CHR-RAM with a homebrew.
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
tepples
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Re: My art showcase (Small update and some new stuff)

Post by tepples »

infiniteneslives wrote:Only thing worth leaving room for is an HUD, maybe 30-50 tiles or less? Since it's RAM you wouldn't even need to store the entire alphanumeric alphabet, just use a tile per character.
Faxanadu (licensed), Super Bat Puncher (homebrew), and RHDE (homebrew in development) reserve a bunch of tiles for text boxes. Faxanadu does so because the Japanese version displays kanji. Super Bat Puncher does so to display a 4-pixel top and bottom border on a 32-pixel-tall text box. And RHDE will do so for a proportional font.
My point is, feel free to use up the majority of a PT for a scene! :) If you're not using them, they're effectively being wasted IMO.
It still pays to conserve tiles to an extent, as that allows for easier pattern replacement when scrolling from one scene to the scene next to it. Battle Kid loads only the tiles needed for one screen, and that's why it doesn't scroll.
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infiniteneslives
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Re: My art showcase (Small update and some new stuff)

Post by infiniteneslives »

tepples wrote:It still pays to conserve tiles to an extent, as that allows for easier pattern replacement when scrolling from one scene to the scene next to it. Battle Kid loads only the tiles needed for one screen, and that's why it doesn't scroll.
200-220 tiles per level/scene is still conservative as I see it. You could have even more via bank switching without much trouble, my suggestion allowed the graphics to stay on UNROM. Battlekid's tile use isn't so complex that it couldn't scroll. It was just a design/style decision sivak made which removes the complications involved with scrolling, I can't imagine it was due to tile limitations...
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
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