AuthorTopic: The Retro RPG Challenge 1  (Read 197066 times)

Offline Peppermint Pig

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The Retro RPG Challenge 1

on: August 12, 2005, 03:16:56 pm
Hey everyone. We're bringing back the challenges! Its about time, too!

This is the Retro RPG challenge. Back in the day, for those old enough to remember, there were such classics as Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Warrior. For those of you who are not fossils of the Pleistocene, you're probably at least familiar with the franchises which lived on to grace Nintendo's Gameboy, GameboyColor, and GBA, not to mention the major consoles, along with the appearance of other hits such as Fire Emblem and Pokemon. This particular challenge will be asking you to develop some tiles and a mockup, done within specifications comparable to the Gameboy Color (GBC), but simplified for our purposes. GBC specifications are somewhere between the NES and SNES actually, with quite a bit more base power than the NES. The hope here is that you can do better than those ancient NES titles in terms of quality, which is quite likely if you give it your best effort!

You may team up with one other person, so this might be a great opportunity to work with a friend, or someone new to the forum! Feel free to ask them in the OT or use the PM system. This particular challenge is going to be fairly accessible to any skill range, so do not avoid this!

Your goal shall be to create a top-down tileset for a traditional RPG. Your subject matter may be a castle, village, overworld, or even a murky cavern, inn, or shop. Anything within the general stereotype of a traditional fantasy RPG is acceptable!

Tiles: There is no tile # requirement or limit for this challenge. Go mad crazy with tile work! While many GBC games have used 16x16 looking tiles for their unit grid, you're are allowed to work in 8x8's or 16x16's.

Mockup: The resolution of the GBC screen is 160x144. If you want to create a larger mockup than that, go for it (practically every GBC game had some method for panning to view a larger area), however you should create at least two mockups of said size.

Color: Tiles may only use 4 colors each. Your entire palette shall consist of no more than 56 colors of your choice. Consider one of those colors as a transparency. Each mockup you create may only use 32 different colors out of your 56 color limit (or 32 colors per 160x144 screen area). You may want to create a second mockup using different colors. The GBC itself has a little over 32,000 colors to choose from, but you can pick any 56.

Sprites: There is no requirement to create sprites, however if you choose to, sprites should be 3 colors, with 1 additional color always to be used as transparency. You may wish to create some static sprites... rocks, barrels, treasure chests. These should be no larger than 16x16. Provided this challenge is successful, we'll move on to a second or third challenge to help you flesh out your classic rpg design skills. :)

Because we can all learn from the good and bad that has come before us, I'm providing some samples of GBC game screenshots to help you:

Lufia: The Legend Returns



Dragon Warrior Monsters 2: Tara's Adventure



Dragon Warrior III


Good luck everyone!
« Last Edit: September 13, 2005, 03:49:02 pm by Peppermint Pig »

Offline Darion

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Re: The Retro RPG Challenge 1

Reply #1 on: August 12, 2005, 03:37:57 pm
Oh me jeez! Hawt!
@darionmccoy

Offline Xion

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Re: The Retro RPG Challenge 1

Reply #2 on: August 12, 2005, 05:58:51 pm
Yay!
Freaking sweet, man!

Can we animate?

Offline ptoing

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Re: The Retro RPG Challenge 1

Reply #3 on: August 12, 2005, 06:30:52 pm
OK, i dug up some more information about gbc stuff.

in the 56 colour mode you actually have 64 colours, but 8 are always transparency colours D:

You basically have 2 sets of 8 4-colour palettes. One for the background and one for the sprites.



If you look at the pic above you can see that the 2 tiles have actually the same yellow in them, but they are using 2 different palettes. That's how stuff works on gbc.
You can't just assign 32 bg colours and use any 4 on any tile. Same goes for sprites (I was lazy and did not do 8 palettes as you can see :P)

But basically you can have more than 32 colours on screen if using sprites as well and having clever palettes. But in most cases it would be hard having palettes with completely different colours.

Also the bitdepth is 15bit, with 5 bit per channel. I don't know any other pixelprogramm than promotion that can do that in fact. So most people prolly can neglect this for this challenge.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline Crazy Asian Gamer

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Re: The Retro RPG Challenge 1

Reply #4 on: August 13, 2005, 12:19:17 am
Lufia and Dragon Warrior 3 looks so pretty:D
I'm gonna try this, and I'm gonna fail. But I'm gonna try anyways.
[edit] =( Nuts, homework. [/edit]
« Last Edit: August 15, 2005, 01:52:06 am by Crazy Asian Gamer »

Offline Helm

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Re: The Retro RPG Challenge 1

Reply #5 on: August 13, 2005, 12:19:57 am


I PRESENT: ASS CLIMBER! HE WAS BORN TO CLIMB... ASS



ASS CLIMBER TAKE 2, 8x8

Too much ass for one day. Maybe I'll make proper tiles for this soon. I hate tiling, and it's too much work.

Offline Schu

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Re: The Retro RPG Challenge 1

Reply #6 on: August 13, 2005, 12:26:08 am
Haha that's great, Helm xD But is he an asshat climber? I like the greener one. 'Tis soothing. 

Starting my week off of work, so I'm gonna try this challenge. I had a little walking guy done today but the email didn't send home grrr...
---Schu

Offline Xion

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Re: The Retro RPG Challenge 1

Reply #7 on: August 13, 2005, 02:13:11 am
BG:

BG+sprites:

BG+sprites+dialogue:


Fleh.

I probably broke some rules, but whatever. (We can overlay tiles with transparency, right?)

btw; Helm, that is awesome.
« Last Edit: August 13, 2005, 02:18:52 am by Xion Night »

Offline ptoing

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Re: The Retro RPG Challenge 1

Reply #8 on: August 13, 2005, 02:34:41 am
technically the sprites have too many colours, and if you go by strict gbc specs you can not overlay tiles. only one bglayer.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline Xion

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Re: The Retro RPG Challenge 1

Reply #9 on: August 13, 2005, 02:51:27 am
I'll give it another shot.

[edit]
Is this better:

[/edit]
« Last Edit: August 13, 2005, 03:05:40 am by Xion Night »