darryl.revok wrote:I'm guessing that the main reason that most RPGs don't animate the enemies is due to the amount of graphics for which there are room on the cart. If you put the graphics for the animations in your cart, I'd put them in the battle, because there'd be little reason not to.
Well, Yeah as I said. No enemies will be on the field unless its one NM Bounty that you pop do to day/time/item conditions. Only those would be animated outside of battle. However inside the battles is where they will be animated if there will be enough space to do so.
darryl.revok wrote: Perhaps if someone has completed a similar project then they could give you an approximation but I don't think anyone here has completed an RPG. Actually, the Quest Forge game is the only homebrew NES game that I've heard of but I'm a little out of the loop.
Yeah, its because side scrolls games are much easier and less time consuming to produce, but not the rout I want to go. May be for a spin off but I am not interested in that at this time
and yes, MMC3 and Rom with what ever mock up you can put together seems the way to go but I can't set anything in stone just yet.
darryl.revok wrote:I remember when I was a kid and I was really into SNES RPGs, my friends and relatives would tend to think that the games didn't have good graphics
Funny how people say that. 8-bit 16-bit etc, you can go back to them 50 years from now and they still look appealing to the eye. Try to go back and play games for the ps1 like FF8, RE1 and so forth and they look so damn horrible.
darryl.revok wrote:Cart space will ultimately be your limiting factor for graphics. After you do a few characters, enemies, cutscenes, etc, it would probably be a good idea to calculate how much content you're going to have in your game and aim for about 256 KB of 2bpp graphics.
Understood. Might need someone to calculate that >< I'd be lost on that part.
If I was going to animate either the characters or the enemies, I'd animate the characters, because you'll be seeing them all of the time. Even FF1 had slightly animated characters. How valuable the space is depends on how long the game is. Do you want to prioritize quantity of graphics or quality of animations? These are the game design choices you have to make.
It would be the characters of course. Quantity of Graphics is aways on top for something like the NES animations you can get away with things just the same as Mario. NIntendo didnt even do a full walking animations. so as far as animations goes you can always trick the eye with the right frames.
And how big would the game be? That I think depends on the player. It would be big enough to last a good chunk of time and slightly fast if they dont want to do any of the extra content. They'll just have harder battles without doing so. Some where around that line. Either way, you always needed to devote time for RPGs especially if they are going to buy a physical copy. Who here loves buying a $65 dollar game to be beaten in a few hours? I sure don't but that's just my own opinion.
darryl.revok wrote:You may be able to creatively arrange the sprite tiles so that the characters could share graphics for arms and weapons, if that's the way your game works. In a lot of the RPGs, characters rarely have the same weapon types, so they don't have a need to share the graphics.
Yeah no they have their own. Already as it is I can't detail the weapons how I want them to be. That's where those Cut Scenes come in.
darryl.revok wrote:Your tiles also don't have to be aligned to a grid. Take a look at how my main character is stored in CHR. Notice the split on the legs. The game engine lines the sprites up properly.
It's a force of habit. Reason why I do it that way at first is because I don't want a tile that has only a few pixels on it. That to me is just a waste of byte/space. Im pretty sure the sword would be on a different layer in the battle, but things will get adjusted accordingly.
With that said I would animate everything just to have it on file. Whether they all will be used or not all depends on the space. So at least I have things to choose from to keep or add in rather than not having enough work to mess around with.