NES Dev Collaborative Fighting Game

[Memblers]

This method would use a total of 3 sprite palettes (1 base + 2 detail) and 1 BG palette (the base for the BG character), leaving 1 sprite palette and 3 BG palettes left to play with. Of course, you'd need to settle for somewhat smaller characters, but I really think this will look a lot better. 3-color characters usually look very bland, no matter how large they are.

I definitely agree, that's what I called the "accent sprites" earlier. I think we should allow for it. The max width of the character then is up to how many accent sprites that you use (per line!). I think we don't necessarily want all characters to be the same size, and with different artists working separately, the proportions are likely to be all different anyways. We need some base models.

[Zepper]

Things can't be "kicks and punches" only. Think about a MegaMan character firing against Leonardo, from TMNT, and he can block the shots using his Katana.

[tokumaru]

Yeah, I just voted for Smash Bros. style... I guess I couldn't resist the though of having platforming elements in a fighting game! =)

Seriously though, I get Membler's point about keeping it simple. I still think a SFII fighting game would be prety easy to program, but I agree that drawing the graphics would take a lot of time. OTOH, platforming elements might increase the complexity of the project a bit, but that might be worth it.

Anyway, keeping the fighters small would make it easy for everyone to include their own characters, as it wouldn't take forever to draw all the frames. Though I still think that having all the frames in just 8KB of CHR-RAM would be pretty limiting, so I keep voting for CHR-ROM, in spite of the smaller characters.

I have a couple of characters from unfinished (for now) projects I could consider including in the game.

We need some base models.

We should probably post pictures of the characters we plan to put in the game, so that everyone can have an idea of what we're dealing with.

[Celius]

I'd like to include these characters:

http://www.freewebs.com/the_bott/CeliusNESPortrait.bmp
http://www.freewebs.com/the_bott/LeahNES.bmp

Celius is the first one, and Leah is the one below that (though I might change her name to Lelia). If I submit Leah, she'd be wearing a coat and possibly a witch hat, as she's a witch.

[tokumaru]

I would probably have to go with Skeleton Joe or one of my nameless worms, as I obviously can't use Sonic.

Joe:

Worms:

Most of us will have small sprites already, but would need to draw larger ones if that style is chosen. Personally, I have ZERO time to dedicate to this thing right now, but I really would like to see where it goes.

[Bregalad]

Actually, that character is only made of 3 colors, and I don't think it's horribly obvious.

Yeah, but it seems that it is on a black backround, that you didn't include in your color count. If a sprite is 3 colors on a black background (like Final Fantasy battle sprites or Contra bosses of stage 5 and 6), it will look terrible if pasted on a random background because there is no black outinles. If you add black outlines, you get a 4th color and this can't be done with only one layer.

But I agree it should be possible to make characters with only 3 colors without it being obvious, especially since due to their large size, a heavy usage of lighning and dithering could be easily done.
And I don't think drawing larger characters should take more time than drawing small ones. You have less to worry about tiny details, and each single pixel won't change radically the end result, like it does for small images.

Most of us will have small sprites already, but would need to draw larger ones if that style is chosen.

It's very easy to enlarge a sprite (Tile Molester does that very easily), and then remove the blocky "metapixels" and replace them by staight curves. It will look identical, but bigger. You're also free to add detail and dithering where you want, and you'll end up with handsome big sprites. I've done that to create portraits of my characters, based on their regular sprites, so that I'd be sure their face would be the same shape.

I have at least 2 characters to submit right now, Lucia and a yet unnamed boss that can bee seen on that Screenshot (sorry I'm too lazy to rip the sprites apart right now) :
http://jonathan.microclub.ch/rainbow/im ... ll_009.png
Also the sprites are obsolete, I've made them smaller since them to gain some CHR space, but still conserved the old bigger version in case of.

Their more detailed portraits (made from the small sprites like I mentionned above) can been seen here :

[Celius]

My character just happens to be against a black background. He is really outlined in black. The only other two tones used in the sprite are for skin color and coat color. Though the coat color is also used for the hair, and the skin color is also used for the fur outlining the coat.

See the link to the portraits of my characters. He is against a blue background this time.

[Bregalad]

Oh my your portraits are so realistic as opposed to mines. This makes me feel a little bad, but whathever. I really belived your sprite had a darker brown color too, it looks like so on the avatar. Probably because it was scaled down ?

[Celius]

I don't think my portraits are realistic. And I like your portraits, especially the guy on the right. They may be more defined because they're 64x96 pixels, though.

The color may be different because they're from different emulators. The portrait is from Nestopia, my avatar is from FCEUXD. I hear that brown shows up really different on different emulators, so I'll have to make sure I'm using one that doesn't look bad on any emulator.

[Bananmos]

Not trying to be pessimistic here... but I kind of doubt this concept of using avatars from homebrewn games by programmers who double as pixel artists will give us enough content to keep this project from becoming a sitting duck.

I think most people working on their homebrewn games here would focus on working on those homebrews rather than being distracted by another project. And why shouldn't they? There's hardly any point of having the hero of your own homebrewn game as a cameo in a fighting-game if that hero doesn't have his own game to begin with. ;)

Instead, my recommendation to Roth (and anyone else wanting to take an active role in this) would be to try and recruit people from far and wide. Heck, there's a whole community for musicians interested in doing NES/Famicom music (2a03.org), so there ought to be at least some kind of similar interest in drawing NES-graphics. It shouldn't be impossible to find at least some talented pixel artists who'd fancy the idea of contributing a character of their own free choice to a homebrewn fighting game.

And with the limits talked about, even someone with little experience in NES graphics could grasp the limitations. Just have one layer with 3 colors + transparency that can be used pretty freely, and another 3-color layer where you should try to draw smaller details sparingly and close together.

This by no means implies that I wouldn't like to actually see the avatars from your homebrews star in this possible fighting game. I just hope the list of potential content contributors won't be limited to these forums by mere principle. :)

[Celius]

Well the characters from our games don't have to be the only ones in the game. I know this wouldn't contribute enough characters at all. But I've contributed 2, Bregalad's contributed 2, and Tokumaru seems to have contributed 1 or 2 characters. That's already 5-6 characters and we can come up with more.

I actually could contribute a few other characters. I don't have any art scanned for them or anything. I do have one question though. Would it be a bad idea to have some of these characters have a humorous/comical appeal to them? I mean, I could contribute like 5 more characters if that's not the case.

I happen to really enjoy making NES graphics. I've been told that I'm good at it, so I could contribute that way. I'll make a picture containing all the fighters I'd contribute. Possibly in their NES form with portraits. It'll take me a while, though.

EDIT: Just so you know, if I were to contribute as a graphical artist for this project, I'd focus on this more than my other project. At the moment, I'm lazy about my other project because I finished doing most of the map engine with AI handling, and I just have to do some boring optimizations and stuff. But focusing on art would be really fun for me, even if I did have to draw 16-20 animation frames for 16 or so characters.

[Bregalad]

If the project last for a while I'll have a few more potential characters hopefully.
Sometimes I like doing graphics but not always. It' hard to exaplain.
Since I'm often stuck an a project it's a good idea to work on another to change mind, to eventually continue the former project when you feel the motivation to do it.

[tepples]

You say 16 to 20. Once I calculated how many animation frames one would need for each character in a Street Fighter clone, and it was around 100. I forget the breakdown I used then, but imagine a Ryu/Ken/Mario type character with moves like these, and then draw 3 to 5 frames for each:

stand
quick attack
strong attack
crouch
crouch + quick attack
crouch + strong attack
jump straight up
jump forward
jump backward
jump + quick attack
jump + strong attack
toss fireball
rising dragon uppercut/super jump punch
whirlwind kick/spin jump
being hit on ground
being hit in air
being knocked back
being thrown
getting up
burned by fire or electric attack

[Celius]

We'd have to minimize this, obviously. a 6x9 character would take 5400 different tiles according to that math, and that's just not happening. For one thing, I see quick attack and strong attack. We could do away with those. Also, it's not really the frames that count as the space eaters. It's the tiles. We can store tile mappings of the characters for each move in ROM and re-use lots of the tile data. Every character would be given a limited amount of graphical data. What should this limit be? 4k? 8k? 6k? We'll be using bankswitched CHR ROM, right?

[Bregalad]

Well, that's sure a lot of frames. But you should do kick/punch instead of quick/strong attacks I guess for most characters.
And it's possible to reduce the frames, for example when getting up it would display crouch then quickly normal frame again. It should look decent. But tepples is right that about 20 frame may not be enough. It should be possible to re-use many tiles between frames tough. Although we'll have to reuse less if using 8x16 sprites. I still think that a limit of 8k should be decent, maybe I'm wrong.