rainwarrior wrote:The NTSC rendering has a repeating colour-error emphasis every 3rd pixel of a scanline
Would i be able to properly view how this looks on an AVS on a HDTV in Europe? I've been thinking about treating myself with one (to be able to play N.American releases properly, but also to be able to test things like these out).
But yeah, these two mockups are so-far pretty heavy on dither in places I think it just might be the style i want, but i may want to revise it if i find it godawful on HW.
My initial assumption was that a tower level would have vertical scrolling (and thus vertical parallax). So I was surprised when you showed with that GIF that you meant to shift the parallax background only horizontally. Is this screen meant to be static vertically then?
Yes
I figured there's some merit to it being the other way around (not as a general rule for the game, but as a mode among others you can have in some level segment to vary the overall experience).
Vertical progression + vertical scrolling, and
vertical progression + vertically static screens
will provide very different opportunities to present platforming challenges, enemy behavior and so on. Think about Battle Kid 1/2 and how much the gameplay relies on a scene/screen being set up all at once for its platforming puzzles to work. It's also different from the church tower in
Warakiya village in CV3, where the pit of death is constantly changing depending on your elevation because of the ratchet scroll, but in my mockup, pits of death are fixed-point.
Another reason i wanted this segment to scroll horizontally is because i'm thinking of ways the player could interact with the outside (i don't want to spoil
how at this point).
<Digression>
Another study case i find interesting is
the clock tower of untimely death in CV3: You go up, and after defeating Grant DaNasty's monster form, you go back down. The scrolling mode is ratchet scrolling which herds the player character in the right direction. The part i find so interesting is that they change the direction of the ratchet, so first when you scale the tower, if you fall down, you fall to your death. But on the way down, you can take plenty of shortcuts by simply falling. Besides the obvious point that it lets you get back to the door, i think they made it this way so that the downhill travel would intentionally take a lot shorter time and feel different (which makes a lot of sense since the level is reused). The fact that Grant is faster, jumps longer, can control his trajectory while jumping/falling, and climb walls also plays part in the shortcut taking/quick backtracking, all while keeping it fresh.</Digression>
Of course, you can do some timing-based platforming puzzles in a vertically scrolling tower, too. Above mentioned clock tower in the digression, for example, has a few instances where the spawning of a medusa head is triggered based on player elevation (you set it off by a jump that forces the scroll upwards). The puzzle here is to sync the enemies' appearance nicely with the cycle of constantly spawning medusa heads to make life a bit easier while maneuvering through the building.
Your estimates for tile permuations sounded like you only meant for 1 dimension of parallax, not 2. (Incidentally, using sprites could make both feasible at once?)
This is also correct, i intended it for one dimension. Plus the way i'm using different attributes in the forest horizon should prohibit vertical parallax... I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how sprites would help with 2-minensional parallax, though?