"I would show you a trick but the taxman stole my cards. What an uncivilized society!"
I Am New To Pixeling
View Raw Firki
Unless you already know.
This article might also be hella helpful if you really want to gather more pntz by submitting chipbattle art on majors but you don't know how to at least get a tincan for it. ^,^
-Photoshop
-GIMP
-asesprite
-Paint.NET
Coming soon as well.
Quick crash course by orion here.
As setups for 8-bit consoles vary most of the time, we're going to get along with one you most probably remember: Nintendo Entertainment System, any oldschool gamer's heaven, any eightbitman's shrine and the console which gets practically all the places in Winter/Summer Chips.
Sprites
Technical
Some general theory before we start: about 99% of NES games' visuals are divided to backgrounds and sprites. While the background layer is somewhat self-explanatory and is limited only with color amount (of which we'll speak later on), sprites are more interesting, limitation-wise, because... Because say, they're only 8x8 or 8x16 pixels big! :o The console can show no more than 64 sprites, and just 8 of these can be shown on one line. Go farther than eight - and you'll get that insane flickering Kart Fighter is notable for.
So, several such small sprites are laid out - and in the result, they make up a metasprite, that's to make some actual representations of story characters rather than dumb 8x8 stick figures. To give you a more proper idea of how metasprites work, Mario can be drawn with two sprites
8 color sets can be defined at once, with each having 4 colors. Of course, that doesn't mean you can have all 32 colors shown on the screen, no-o-o-o-o! In fact, all the sprites require a transparent color (unless they're crates), which leaves you with 3. To fight the disease, you can either let each element of your metasprite have its' own set (like in Contra or Hummer Team's Street Fighter II and its' countless repackagings like the above mentioned Kart Fighter) or just pile up two sprites with different color sets on one another (like in Mega Man)!
(speaking of Mega Man, NES's palette has got a lot of shades of blue, so by now, you most definitely know why he's all blue :D)
Aesthetic
In case if you go for the "three colors only" scheme, most of the time you're gonna spin around color sets such as these:
- one outline color (the darkest), one light color (the lightest, used mainly to show some skin ^,^), one special color (which might be used for the clothing and can be, well, anything: red, green, purple);
- one outline color, one midtone color, one light color - works for the sprites which bet more on shading and form than on colorfulness.
The big ass boss fights are a different story - while visually it appears that they occur on a pure black background, in reality, bosses ARE a part of the background, with a lot of tile scrolling abuse! That's where you need to abuse shading A LOT, or relatively a lot.
Now let's pretend you're making an action-y NES game mockup and you need to make it look pretty much believable. So, depending on the genre, the sprites should basically be that big:
- Platform game: it depends, I'm pretty sure you don't wanna go lower than 2x2 and farther than 4x4. A good example of a pretty big platform game sprite would be Felix the Cat from the eponymous game by Hudson.
- Shooting game aka scrollshooter aka shmup: lame vertical shmups use 2x2 metas for the hero spaceship, the better ones opt for 3x3. 2x2 is perfectly okay for the enemies, though, since there's gonna be a lot of them AND a lot of bullets.
- Fighting game: thou shalt not make your fighter more than 4 sprites wide, although if he/she has such a stance which leaves A LOT of space between his/her feet, that would go. As for the height, go for whatever you want, but keep the aesthetical proportions intact!
- GTA clone: well, the creator of Retro City Rampage knows how to handle such a genre on the NES better, and if you decide to follow his experience, you can pretty much use 1x2 metas for people walking around and 3x3 (with literal corner-cutting) for the vehicles.
P. S. Count all the times the word "sprite" is used in this section (including that one instance you've just read), and contact brightentayle to win a golden pixelated tincan! :o
More detailed info coming soon enough.
Quick crash course by orion here. This one also covers isometrics, it seems. :D
Coming soon!
General
Alrighty then, let's go deeper - you've got a seven-color palette here. For each tile, you can put only two colors and, optionally, turn the brightness on and off, as well as turn the flashing on and off (if it's on, both colors on the tile will blink).
Sounds primitive enough, huh? Well, tell me if this looks primitive. Or this. Or, going back to Speccy's commercial era, this. Needless to say, if you wanna go REAL serious with ZX Spectrum screens, you've gotta inspire yourself with these pictures all the time. :D
Even then, the strict limitations of Speccy's standard graphical mode haven't yet stopped a lot of pixelists to develop their own style - and that's where learning how to zee-ex may get hard: some people start by laying the outline, some kick off with doing the color grid, some sketch the whole thing on the paper first (you sure won't do the latter for OHBs).
So, for the beginning, you might want to go with the most simplistic scheme: 1-bit graphics! Uh, yeah, this computer's graphics are, roughly saying, 1-bit, which is obvious when you load up an 80s ZX Spectrum gamesy from a cassette tape: first go the pixels, then goes all the color data.
Before going further, though, keep in mind that you're not making your canvas bigger than 256x192 - that's gonna be your target platform resolution.
Sprites
Technical
Well, a lot of sprites on this platform are 1-bit: it's extremely rare that you see one done in full color (but you can - especially if it's gonna be coded by Dave Perry and feature graphics by Nick Bruty).
You won't have to cope with the sprite limit, as well the sprites' sizes, but if you actually get someone to develop a game (:o), you might get across another problem: Z80 doesn't have hardware sprite support, and no hardware scrolling either, so make sure you conserve your resources to keep the pace! \ ^_^ Don't forget that you've got to render both the sprites and the backgrounds right under it either!
If your background is gonna be a bit too pixelly and colorful (i. e. it's more than just a night sky with stars on it and with trees and bushes below), then you might consider doing two things:
1) drawing a white "aura" outline to strengthen the other, black outline - although this one is kinda optional and adds up to the RAM usage;
2) drawing a transparency mask; in other words - a black silhouette for your spritey.
Aesthetic
Try to minimize the amount of details that way so you would still recognize the character because, well, it's 1-bit graphics! You've got only black and white at your disposal.
Regarding the animations, they're gonna be choppy and/or limited. For instance, the protagonist from Exolon only has his feet moving, with his body bobbing up and down for only several frames; while Renegade has just moving feet for both hero and enemy sprites for walking animations (they do move the bodies during the attack/hit phases, though). Also a good reason why ZX Spectrum didn't had Prince of Persia back in the day (the Russian remake doesn't count ^,^).
Full-screen pictures
Technical
Pretty much the same we've been talking about before - see the very start of the ZX Spectrum section.
Aesthetic
That's the point on which you brain might get heated up a bit - with all these "2 colors per tile" limitations (as well as the above mentioned 256x192), keeping all the details natural is hard.
An essential part of decent full-screen pics on Spectrum are the color gradients, used not just for (duh) the gradients themselves, but for ANY objects on the screen, too. To get you started, a "hotter" color set in this case would be black -> red -> purple -> yellow -> white, while a colder one is usually black -> blue -> green -> cyan -> white. Feel free to play around with brightness and switch the colors around - it only helps. :D
More coming soon in the meantime.
BotB Help
::|CONTENTS
- Rook Tutor - Tools To Draw With
- Rook Tutor - The Very Basics
- Rook Tutor - 8-bit
- Rook Tutor - 16-bit
- Expy Tutor - ZX Spectrum
Unless you already know.
This article might also be hella helpful if you really want to gather more pntz by submitting chipbattle art on majors but you don't know how to at least get a tincan for it. ^,^
Rook Tutor - Tools To Draw With
-Photoshop
-GIMP
-asesprite
-Paint.NET
Rook Tutor - The Very Basics
Coming soon as well.
Rook Tutor - 8-bit
Quick crash course by orion here.
As setups for 8-bit consoles vary most of the time, we're going to get along with one you most probably remember: Nintendo Entertainment System, any oldschool gamer's heaven, any eightbitman's shrine and the console which gets practically all the places in Winter/Summer Chips.
Sprites
Technical
Some general theory before we start: about 99% of NES games' visuals are divided to backgrounds and sprites. While the background layer is somewhat self-explanatory and is limited only with color amount (of which we'll speak later on), sprites are more interesting, limitation-wise, because... Because say, they're only 8x8 or 8x16 pixels big! :o The console can show no more than 64 sprites, and just 8 of these can be shown on one line. Go farther than eight - and you'll get that insane flickering Kart Fighter is notable for.
So, several such small sprites are laid out - and in the result, they make up a metasprite, that's to make some actual representations of story characters rather than dumb 8x8 stick figures. To give you a more proper idea of how metasprites work, Mario can be drawn with two sprites
8 color sets can be defined at once, with each having 4 colors. Of course, that doesn't mean you can have all 32 colors shown on the screen, no-o-o-o-o! In fact, all the sprites require a transparent color (unless they're crates), which leaves you with 3. To fight the disease, you can either let each element of your metasprite have its' own set (like in Contra or Hummer Team's Street Fighter II and its' countless repackagings like the above mentioned Kart Fighter) or just pile up two sprites with different color sets on one another (like in Mega Man)!
(speaking of Mega Man, NES's palette has got a lot of shades of blue, so by now, you most definitely know why he's all blue :D)
Aesthetic
In case if you go for the "three colors only" scheme, most of the time you're gonna spin around color sets such as these:
- one outline color (the darkest), one light color (the lightest, used mainly to show some skin ^,^), one special color (which might be used for the clothing and can be, well, anything: red, green, purple);
- one outline color, one midtone color, one light color - works for the sprites which bet more on shading and form than on colorfulness.
The big ass boss fights are a different story - while visually it appears that they occur on a pure black background, in reality, bosses ARE a part of the background, with a lot of tile scrolling abuse! That's where you need to abuse shading A LOT, or relatively a lot.
Now let's pretend you're making an action-y NES game mockup and you need to make it look pretty much believable. So, depending on the genre, the sprites should basically be that big:
- Platform game: it depends, I'm pretty sure you don't wanna go lower than 2x2 and farther than 4x4. A good example of a pretty big platform game sprite would be Felix the Cat from the eponymous game by Hudson.
- Shooting game aka scrollshooter aka shmup: lame vertical shmups use 2x2 metas for the hero spaceship, the better ones opt for 3x3. 2x2 is perfectly okay for the enemies, though, since there's gonna be a lot of them AND a lot of bullets.
- Fighting game: thou shalt not make your fighter more than 4 sprites wide, although if he/she has such a stance which leaves A LOT of space between his/her feet, that would go. As for the height, go for whatever you want, but keep the aesthetical proportions intact!
- GTA clone: well, the creator of Retro City Rampage knows how to handle such a genre on the NES better, and if you decide to follow his experience, you can pretty much use 1x2 metas for people walking around and 3x3 (with literal corner-cutting) for the vehicles.
P. S. Count all the times the word "sprite" is used in this section (including that one instance you've just read), and contact brightentayle to win a golden pixelated tincan! :o
More detailed info coming soon enough.
Rook Tutor - 16-bit
Quick crash course by orion here. This one also covers isometrics, it seems. :D
Coming soon!
Expy Tutor - ZX Spectrum
General
Alrighty then, let's go deeper - you've got a seven-color palette here. For each tile, you can put only two colors and, optionally, turn the brightness on and off, as well as turn the flashing on and off (if it's on, both colors on the tile will blink).
Sounds primitive enough, huh? Well, tell me if this looks primitive. Or this. Or, going back to Speccy's commercial era, this. Needless to say, if you wanna go REAL serious with ZX Spectrum screens, you've gotta inspire yourself with these pictures all the time. :D
Even then, the strict limitations of Speccy's standard graphical mode haven't yet stopped a lot of pixelists to develop their own style - and that's where learning how to zee-ex may get hard: some people start by laying the outline, some kick off with doing the color grid, some sketch the whole thing on the paper first (you sure won't do the latter for OHBs).
So, for the beginning, you might want to go with the most simplistic scheme: 1-bit graphics! Uh, yeah, this computer's graphics are, roughly saying, 1-bit, which is obvious when you load up an 80s ZX Spectrum gamesy from a cassette tape: first go the pixels, then goes all the color data.
Before going further, though, keep in mind that you're not making your canvas bigger than 256x192 - that's gonna be your target platform resolution.
Sprites
Technical
Well, a lot of sprites on this platform are 1-bit: it's extremely rare that you see one done in full color (but you can - especially if it's gonna be coded by Dave Perry and feature graphics by Nick Bruty).
You won't have to cope with the sprite limit, as well the sprites' sizes, but if you actually get someone to develop a game (:o), you might get across another problem: Z80 doesn't have hardware sprite support, and no hardware scrolling either, so make sure you conserve your resources to keep the pace! \ ^_^ Don't forget that you've got to render both the sprites and the backgrounds right under it either!
If your background is gonna be a bit too pixelly and colorful (i. e. it's more than just a night sky with stars on it and with trees and bushes below), then you might consider doing two things:
1) drawing a white "aura" outline to strengthen the other, black outline - although this one is kinda optional and adds up to the RAM usage;
2) drawing a transparency mask; in other words - a black silhouette for your spritey.
Aesthetic
Try to minimize the amount of details that way so you would still recognize the character because, well, it's 1-bit graphics! You've got only black and white at your disposal.
Regarding the animations, they're gonna be choppy and/or limited. For instance, the protagonist from Exolon only has his feet moving, with his body bobbing up and down for only several frames; while Renegade has just moving feet for both hero and enemy sprites for walking animations (they do move the bodies during the attack/hit phases, though). Also a good reason why ZX Spectrum didn't had Prince of Persia back in the day (the Russian remake doesn't count ^,^).
Full-screen pictures
Technical
Pretty much the same we've been talking about before - see the very start of the ZX Spectrum section.
Aesthetic
That's the point on which you brain might get heated up a bit - with all these "2 colors per tile" limitations (as well as the above mentioned 256x192), keeping all the details natural is hard.
An essential part of decent full-screen pics on Spectrum are the color gradients, used not just for (duh) the gradients themselves, but for ANY objects on the screen, too. To get you started, a "hotter" color set in this case would be black -> red -> purple -> yellow -> white, while a colder one is usually black -> blue -> green -> cyan -> white. Feel free to play around with brightness and switch the colors around - it only helps. :D
More coming soon in the meantime.
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