Creating tilesets for beat em up.

[Stickman]

Hi guys! I've been creating animations for a target renegade style beat em up for the Amstrad CPC 128k. The main character (on the right), all his moves have been animated along with splitting the legs and torso's so they can be reused on other characters along with other technical bits and pieces(there's a programmer who is interested in taking this on). Definitely the most difficult of the sprites with over 30 moves (whoooo!)



Anyway - I'm looking to create an animated demo/mock up of the first level of the game and just need to animate the enemy character moves which should not toake too long as they have few moves. What I need to create are the background tiles which I haven't done before. What is the best way of doing these? Would I draw the whole background first then cut them up?
The game is in wide pixels and I have a sheet of 160x200 for the background tiles.

Thanks

Edit: With creating 8x16 tiles on a 160x200 I can have around 125 tiles/bytes which will be 16kb uncompressed. So I'll only be needing one sheet.

[ptoing]

Nice sprites

For the backgrounds I would do a rough layout which are snapped to the tile boundries (8x8 i guess) and then fill in detail.
A good perspective would be something like in double dragon of final fight I suppose, where you have a kinda skewed floor.

[Helm]

these look great. If I can offer a piece of advice,  try to make a background with middle values and not too much sharp saturation, if possible with the palette. I'd even prefer a two greys + black background color set to a full-palette tileset because the characters will be drowned out in all the loudness.

[Stickman]

Thanks for the replies.

@ptoing: I indeed have started to do a layout of the background. It looks like I will be creating tiles that are 8x16 because of the wide pixels. I noticed that on the CPC version of Renegade it flicks 5 creens, and on Target Renegade it flicks 14 screens. They dont flick "whole" screens - just a quater(or something like that). So what your saying is for me to put a grid on the layout that I'm roughing out where the squares are 8x16?
Yes - the background will be that perspective style of the old beat em ups.

@Helm. Yes your right. This has been one of the things that I need to be extremely careful of. There are a few easy on the eye tones on the CPC palette but only 1 grey unfortunately. There is a very easy green that also works well and isn't very harsh. The current picture I posted has 12 colours, so I have another 4 to play with. Looking at the CPC renegade stuff, they do a really nice job of making sure that the characters standout as they seem to keep all the busy areas at the top of the screen, with the ground area a peppered texture of only 2 colours.

[Mathias]

Attractive sprites. Wide-pixel isn't the easiest.

All those sprites share the same legs, I find that a tad odd. Especially the far feet with the cyan details, really jump out and creates an odd repeating effect. At the least, I'd recommend a palette swap to differentiate player char from enemies.

[Stickman]

Attractive sprites. Wide-pixel isn't the easiest.

All those sprites share the same legs, I find that a tad odd. Especially the far feet with the cyan details, really jump out and creates an odd repeating effect. At the least, I'd recommend a palette swap to differentiate player char from enemies.

It's true, but I have to see what the programmer can do. It's a 2 player game and the second character has different coloured jeans. Studying the renegade games share thye same legs due to RAM space. The sprites have to be composited together as well as other things such as music, weapons and just generally the whole game engine on a 4mhz cpu with no hardware sprites and limited scrolling capabilities and 128kb of rAM that can't be accessed all at once. This all has to be processed in real time along with a conversion array to mirror the sprites. Adding palette changes would also be have to be coded, so I haven't done much variation colours on the legs as yet. It's a tricky battle between RAM vs CPU with these 8 bit machines.

But yeah....I think when it comes to the animation demo, I'll do one palette change of legs for one of the enemy groups and I'll have a look at that cyan on the feet.

[Stickman]

Unfinished rough layout background of what I'm aiming for. I still need to add stuff to the alleyway, but I think that the sprites will be readable with these colours. I very much doubt if any of this is tile friendly! There are obvious mistakes I would need to sort out like the pavement lines, shutter details, cracks and wear and tear on the wall etc. (Pretty much the whole thing!)
As a test, I cut out only the brick work on the front of the building (8 pixels wide, 16 pixels down) and looks like I would end up with over 30 tiles! I'm going to have to do some serious research and whole lot of learning on how to do tiles.

[ptoing]

Nitpicks:
I think the highlights on the garage shutter stand out too much and the dude with the grey pants looks like he kinda has ghost legs, due to the ground colour.

Otherwise this looks very nice.

[Stickman]

Nitpicks:
I think the highlights on the garage shutter stand out too much and the dude with the grey pants looks like he kinda has ghost legs, due to the ground colour.

Otherwise this looks very nice.

I agree about the highlights and will either tone them down with another colour and if not, I'll get rid of the light blue.
The grey jeans - When zoomed in and not shown at this small scale, is a lot more visible. It would be played 3 times the size. However - I do have a mellow purple jeans version just in case

Edit: I need 8 screens worth or tiles for the scrolling. I take it that it would be best for me to rough out the whole level 8 screens wide?

[ptoing]

At this point you probably also could copy paste bits you already have in this screen around and then do edits and connecting bits.