Platformer #34 - New Art, Quick Play, 1 of 4
62023-03-19. I thought I should record a play-through of the level with the newer artwork. It was drawn in Aseprite. I tried using the NES palette, but it was too restrictive, as it was very saturated, and didn't have enough darks. NES palette has a lot of hues, but only 4 colors per hue -- implying that you must use very bright versions of them. Check out any old-school NES game, and the colors are very bright! Thus, I started using the Google palette in Aseprite, and was able to get decent results. Seamless tiles felt wrong, so I settled on using visible bright/dark edges to all tiles, and 2x2 paint "brush strokes", to make it more "stylized".
The background was once high color count in high resolution, so I made it match better with many touches to reduce color, reducing hues, cleaning up the dithering mess from prior conversions. I know the haze bands aren't proper sized. Also, I am aware that the saturation is quite extreme, and there are no atmospheric / distance effects to help distinguish foreground from background. But all-in-all, an OK job for a first effort by a programmer.
LEGACY NOTES:
2D platformer engine original made ~10 years ago, in 2011, for a local game jam. It is based off of an idea I had for 5 or 10 years or more at the time, for which I have a lot of game design documents for. It predates all of the of the relatively modern 2D and 3D terrain games where you can influence its shape. But it does not predate the abundance of 1980's single-screen, or simple 1-way scrolling, games that implemented these same ideas that perhaps we simply forgot about for 3 decades. This has been a dream for me to create since I played the classics in the 1980's, and was amazed that not only could you create a world for a gamer to live in, but also interact and modify. Of course, I made my own games like this, but the real dream was something much more immersive, but still 2D, where you can get some magical things to happen and be visualized that even 3D mastery cannot achieve. But what you see here is just the basics of a weekend demo that I've cleaned up a bit.
Playlists:
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- Xona System 8: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PqFQv60p-0E&list=PLjnbT4UISq0YwheLThIhm3LDxIkwpmKeb
- Voxel: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uadGU-stF-w&list=PLjnbT4UISq0bQF1g85tE9jTrKfEtdRYlY
- Ray Cast: https://youtube.com/watch?v=SkaPYZOKPQg&list=PLjnbT4UISq0YcFtRFjFQqK0g6ONNCtrvY
- Graph-All: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kLSc7bZW2Bs&list=PLjnbT4UISq0YLgynFSpLzml4BMC6TDZL2
- Scroll Shmup: https://youtube.com/watch?v=l9bIYkZepPo&list=PLjnbT4UISq0Y_7IAN_zUzxgZnfhXxo_0Q
- Road: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rA4g4VX7ys8&list=PLjnbT4UISq0bnfd1RC3M4PgTgkmhlkikV
- Arena Shmup: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VKjiuq437t0&list=PLjnbT4UISq0adw__Y9B2eXA0LL35TyORU
- Wave Function: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ngctVd9VK8I&list=PLjnbT4UISq0Y8vYnrSauHkBKgOBHXFFdf
- 3D Polygon: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0Qq_euAMP48&list=PLjnbT4UISq0YyjqBGG8Q34Kng5gqDmYrT
- GW-BASIC: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QMQJ7o8e-GI&list=PLjnbT4UISq0bMjb81xFBIWOLhBKFCVkuB
Websites:
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- GitHub: https://github.com/JDoucette
- Blog: http://thefirstpixel.com
- Studio: http://xona.com