ok: but there's been a commercial critique on pokemon since last time i was here. im a huge pokemon nerd. so im tempted to read that one instead.
i will edit this post.
first of all, all of the BITMAP BROTHERS games are part of the pixel canon. anyone who will not consider them throws away what is good in life. we can see that even if the robots in Z have not been influences on ptoing, they might as well have been.
IN ALL HONESTY I PREFER Z BECAUSE I PLAYED IT WHEN I WAS A KID. people don't talk about Z even though its more fun to play than is CHAOS ENGINE. it's more-tooley, so we dont consider it a pixel game. BUT IT IS ONE THO, TAUGHT ME HOW TO PIXEL IN FACT
A LOT OF THE POKEMON CHALLENGE STUFF IS REALLY NICE.
so: back to chaos engine. GOAT was still here back then. what does GOAT have to say? well, first he tells us that the BITMAP BROTHERS DID EXIST, which is helpful if oyu didnt know. then he tells us all of the chaos art is still up on
http://hol.abime.net/2985/screenshot and
http://www.lemonamiga.com/?game_id=1848which is good, because we can still look at it and we dont even have to play CHAOS ENGINE unless we want to (its pretty fun).
even just looking at the art i can tell you that even BITMAP BROTHERS can teach us what DAWN BRINGER has done: you can mix red and cyan (any two complimentary colors) to make gray. but also notice the lighting: its subtle but it is bedrock.
we can see at the time that GOAT was having image hosting problems, however, all of his art is still up. none of us need be plagued bu hosting problems now, anyone can just use photobucket, which will stay up forever and has done so.
he pulls apart the dinosaur, in doing so he pulls apart the palette. he also acknowledges the detail in the pontilist tiny people standing around the dinosaur. pontilist tiny peopel is its own whole branch of pixel art with its own conventions.
he notes that the space of colors here is very complicated, even though at first glance it just appears grey. they'e doing little points of interest with complimentary colors, which is nice. points of interest in a sea of grey.
he shows us that the ramp on a metal pipe is not just a flat curve, its very complicated - but so too is anything in a bitmap brothers game. complex ramps.
then helm comes in. what does helm have to tell us? helms' images in this thread are down but i can try to remember them. in any case the words are still up.
helm tells us we should play teh game instead of just looking at the thing. fair enough, point to helm. he even tells us why we should.
helm admits he is a comics guy really but has been forced to become a pixel guy (by the muse i think).
then helm starts talking about the palette again and shows us how to make our own tiles in the bitmap brothers style. unfortunately the images arent up anymore, but i remember them and they were on point.
ANYWAY helm has studied the game CHAOS ENGINE and is made better by this study.
adamtierny comes in. he says that the pixeling (subpixel and superpixel) is good but the form is bad. bad perspective, bad bad restrictions. i will add: a bad interface. but good enough for amiga at the time.
ptoing is too busy to right write away. this is ok; hes busy.
he comes back later and he takes apart the palette. the palette in this game is subnetted like a network, all these parts that do not speak to one another.
he says that the amiga only has 4096 colors on its color space, a cube, 4 shades each of red green and blue. but it is a space and not a scheme: it is not specialised. 4096 is actually big-not-small, but whatever.
the specialised scheme for CHAOS ENGINE changes as we change levels and stuff. 16 colors for teh hud, those never change and never get used outside the hud. these are constant. another however-many-colors for the player characters. so-many for the current level, so-many for enemies. this is good and in concert with good game design. we can swap all these palettes independently of one another. we cn animate them from one frame to the next. and this lets us animate the palette on just a dude who just got hit? did they do this? i dont remember. but they can, because they have subnetted their color space.
i should post this in the CHAOS ENGINE THREAD, NOT THIS ONE
WHAT IS GOOD IN LIFE?