Dark Souls GBC Demake

[Ryumaru]

Decroded: Heh, yeah, there is no more squeezing. However, if I get what Ai is saying, I can have 8 palettes per area as opposed to 8 palettes in the entire game, so that certainly allows me to play a a bit more with stuff like the torchlight areas. I think what got me started with this Zelda ish perspective is I hate how the conventional 3/4 cant really show doorways and such on the sides of walls. Nevertheless I made a test mockup with the standard perspective in the prison cell, and I might adopt some of it into the boss room.

Ai: Thanks for posting that! Do you know anything about the sprites in particular? Can transparency be turned off of sprites to allow full coverage and 4 colors like in my menu? Also been wondering about movement, is it all purely tile based? I'm planning on building the boss in parts,and was wondering if animation could be done by moving those parts pixels at a time, or if it has to be "baked" so to speak into the individual sprites themselves.

[Ai]

I'm far from a wizard with console stuff, I just know how to read technical specs, so anything I say here is just interpretation of what I've read. That said:

Full coverage 4c sprites? Not as far as I can tell, the 'window' layer is usually used for this (ie. you can build such a menu out of tiles, but not out of sprites)

You can place sprites at any position, but need to keep in mind there is a limitation of 10 sprites per scanline / 40 total onscreen. I speculate that they also have a fixed visual priority (drawn left to right, top to bottom). Someone specifically versed in GBC coding might be able to say for sure, but I'd suggest that actual GBC games would use a combination of real sprite movement, swapping sprites out, and other tricks (like the ability to flip sprites) to accomplish complex animation.

This is all taken/extrapolated from the link I gave.

[Decroded]

I hate how the conventional 3/4 cant really show doorways and such on the sides of walls. Nevertheless I made a test mockup with the standard perspective in the prison cell, and I might adopt some of it into the boss room.

u can draw doorways and even doors at the top and bottom and u can certainly imply there are doorways on the sides but its annoying how u cant draw the door itself when it is affects gameplay such as the one on the left.
u might be able to get away with drawing the top and side of a door somehow but its awkward so yeah it seems like zelda view is necessary (evil  ) here.

[Probo]

well youve really nailed the look, it shouted dark souls at me as soon as i saw it and the perspective looks great 

[Kazuya Mochu]

What will happen to the player when moving through that room with the perspective? will he be seen from full top view?

[rikfuzz]

Love this!

Here's a sort of middle-ground between the two perspectives:

In the image on the right, the south/east/west walls are a third smaller than the north one. 
(Just scaled as a test, and not cleaned up, but you get the idea, worth experimenting with I think). 

[Ryumaru]

Decroded: The good thing is I can bend things however I wish as long as it fits the restrictions so I think I will make the north wall more traditionally 3/4ths so that the door can be more impressive, as I think that will do a lot to get the feel of the original game.
Probo: thanks
Kazuya Mochu: Thats one of the "problems" as the character wouldn't change. I'm fine with a little bit of perspective bending, but the boss room will be receiving a bit of a make over.
rikifuzz: Thanks! Yep I like where that example is going; getting the best of both worlds.

In other news, I made this cutscene image of Oscar all with sprite palettes, forgtting about the 40 sprites on screen at a time, heh. I've zeroed in on the ones that " have" to be tiles ( the light rays could potentially be tiles that swap for animation, but would lose their transparency which is most of the point) and counted 34. Just enough to also show the character sprite. Will have do some work to make it fit. It's a fun challenge 

[hawken]

However, if I get what Ai is saying, I can have 8 palettes per area as opposed to 8 palettes in the entire game, so that certainly allows me to play a a bit more with stuff like the torchlight areas.

On the GBC you get 8 palettes of 4 colours for the tile layer, and another set of 8 for the sprite layer. These palettes can be changed freely during run time, for fades, effects etc. from the 32k colours it can display. (15 bit)

Can transparency be turned off of sprites to allow full coverage and 4 colors like in my menu?

Transparency is part of the PPU on the sprite layer so can't be turned off AFAIK. On the upside, the tile layer has no forced shared colour so you may use 4 individual colours per palette.

Also been wondering about movement, is it all purely tile based? I'm planning on building the boss in parts,and was wondering if animation could be done by moving those parts pixels at a time, or if it has to be "baked" so to speak into the individual sprites themselves.

Tile slots can only change tile data. Of course this can be animated tiles to give the illusion of smooth movement. Anything on the sprite layer can be moved freely.

[Ryumaru]

Thanks for the wisdom hawken! 8 palettes at any time frees me up quite a bit.
 
Can you think of any way that my current item set up would work with 4 colors? Or if i wanted to overlay with that diamond shape would each have to be sprites of 3 colors only? I assume windowed mode couldn't show a shape like that?

Anybody got any inspirational/ inventive low color UI stuff or is it all necessarily pretty boring given restrictions?

[Ryumaru]

Man this sprite limit is a lot more restrictive than I thought it would be. 40 sounds like a lot, but it adds up quick. The character with sword and shield is 6 already, and I was planning on some of the hud stuff being sprites too. My first take at the asylum demon ran in at 32 sprites- without wings or a hammer. I slightly more anorexic take brought me down to 24, but suffers a lot for it. I would imagine the hammer alone would have to be at least 6-10 to look impressive enough.

Perhaps I could make the boss smaller, and the environment smaller too so that he still feels large. Either that or I would have to craft some sort of set up where part of him is stationary tiles ( torso/ head) with only his arms and feet moving. hmm...

In the mean time I also completed the oscar cutscene mock up. I'm sure the application of the palettes are a mess, but right now it's just a thought experiment more than the perfect execution.
24:

32:

32 mockup with a hammer that would send me way over the limit