GBC Mockup

[KhrisMUC]

Hey there,

I'm playing with creating an RPG that follows Gameboy Color Restrictions, here's a first mockup:

     Newer:

There are 40 tiles so far, with 10 for the two characters. I'll probably use only the smaller one though; I pixeled the left one first and he was too big for the background.

I'm mostly looking for general critique; is there something obviously wrong with this?
Should I use more tiles? (I tend to fiddle around endlessly with the existing ones rather than add a new one.)

[Crow]

The two reds in the characters are too similar. Then again, I don't know how far you can go with GBC restrictions.

[coffee]

Hi KhrisMUC!

To start with I agree with Crow about the colours chosen for the character.

But my main concern is the tiling, 40 tiles you said, and it still doesn't tile smooth. I would suggest you look into that first off all.
When you work with a small piece like this. I would suggest you keep in mind that you got to keep it as clean as possible to not destroy the object with too many unessecary pixels. especially with a large ammount of tiles. you dont have to put everything into 1, but spread it differently to each seperate piece. So, explore the possibilities you get with many tiles and make it count. I would also suggest you don't just mirrior tiles when doing them. By putting just a little more effort into the different tiles and put some thinking into the tiling it can make the experience a whole lot better!

Yellow arrow: Where you can actually see the "grid" the tiles produce.
Red arrows: Could use a different set of tiles for corners instead of just straight ones.



Also made it just a bit more interesting to look at with some more contrast.

Good luck mate and keep going at it!

[Demian]

Hello!, very nice work and critics so far. The only thing i can say is that i see the small character as a girl instead of a boy (and i suppose it is the same guy but smaller). Don't ask me why though...
Keep the good work!

[piffany]

The colours are quite saturated overall. Tone it down a bit if it's possible under the GC restrictions.

[KhrisMUC]

Thanks very much guys, here's the new version:



Changed the palette slightly (I'm pretty happy with the saturation btw, and the thread suggests this is highly subjective here anyway )

Added a tile, moved some pixels, changed the small character. He did look like a girl, the head wasn't separated from the body at the back of the neck and thus it looked like he had plaited hair or something.

I just realized that in theory I have 256 tiles, more than enough to completely eliminate the grid. I'll probably rework this as soon as I have other backgrounds that use the same tileset.

GBC restrictions btw.: 8 4col background palettes, 8 3col+transparency sprite palettes. The colors have a bit depth of only 5 but there aren't any other restrictions.

Edit:
Btw, here's how this is going to actually look in-game:



The overlay isn't complete yet, I still need to do the logo and refine it a bit.

[piffany]

Wait, this is actually going to be playable on the Gameboy? That's awesome! What language are you programming in and how do you move it to the Gameboy?

[KhrisMUC]

No, that'd be really cool, what you see is an actual screenshot of a 320x240 game. The engine I'm going to use (AGS) doesn't support arbitrary resolutions, so I'm using the lowest available and a border. And since it's going to look like a Gameboy Color game, I decided to use that as border image.