Commercial Critique - Pokemon Red/Blue

[Corinthian Baby]

Creature stuff is great, (just peep Cure's remakes of the original 150) but I would also like to look at some tiles and the evolution of the tiles over the pokemon generations charting how they developed.

[Arne]

And I just looked at the Yellow game data. It appears the graphics (and probably the entire stat blocks) for the monsters is compressed or formatted strangely (to make transfer more secure?). The title screen, map tiles, NPCs, badges, slot machines, pika scenes etc. Are easily visible as they are stored in 2bp gameboy style.

Finding full sprite sheets of the monsters on the net is super easy though.

Many sprites can be found here:
http://www.spriters-resource.com/search/?q=pokemon&g=1
http://www.spriters-resource.com/gameboy/pokerb/sheet/8727

Keep in mind that these are probably ripped, not dumped. Rippers often make mistakes. There are other Pokémon fan-sites which have full sheets like these.

Found some stuff about the Monster/Trainer gfx:
http://hax.iimarck.us/topic/2253/

[Seiseki]

Hm, so regarding limitations..

Why are they using such a mix of black/white and 4 color palettes.
Wouldn't they have been able to add some color and AA to the font and gui?
 Because I started playing around with it, but I'm not sure if my edit would work technically..

[Arne]

The font in old games often use just one bitplane (e.g. BG and black) with the second bitplane being used for other 1bp gfx such as GUI stuff. It saves a little memory.

Regarding color, I think the original games were for the regular GB so they didn't have color data. The GBC would recognize certain popular GB games and attempt to colorize them using built in palettes for the BG and FG objects. The actual GBC games had much more detailed color data associated with the gfx of course.

For the R/B Pokémon games, just look at what they did with the monochrome tones. Lots of gentle nibbling and aliasing on the outlines it seems. I think the larger failings lie in the figure constructions. There are some clumsy poses, odd proportions and lack of faithfulness to source illustrations, but all these issues were addressed in the later versions.

[Seiseki]

Hm, interesting..

But still quite confusing on how the colors are decided.
In the Blue title screen Squirtle is orange while he's blue in combat.

So should we draw everything using the original GB palette or the modified GBC?

[Arne]

The GBC somehow recognized zones or banks in GB games and applied palettes selectively.

As I understand it, Commercial Critique is more about looking at what the games did. Look at the efficiencies and inefficiencies, within the context of the hardware/memory restrictions and display presentation (LCD/CRT whatever). Then maybe try to emulate the awesome things they did and integrate it into your own style, or do paintovers to figure out what they perhaps could have done better (or could they?).

[Ryumaru]

I think, when it comes to the activity, it would be important to have your mockup or revamp work well with the original grey value scale of the gameboy, then perhaps some research could be done into what palettes were used and available, then you could attempt making your piece work in color too ( it seems that hues would change by location mostly. Each pokemon also seems to have it's own palette!)

edit: pokemans have been added. I'm also interested in exactly how the fonts work as the text doesn't always align to tiles, and if I'm not mistaken I've seen at least one gbc game with AAed text... I think?

[Seiseki]

Hm, but the kerning for the font is awful, so I assumed they were just rendering the tiles one after another. I mean look at the spacing around each 'I'.

So when will this activity start? I've already done an edit for the GUI. 

edit: The colors of those sprites looks way more pale than the screenshots..

[Azuyre]

Here are the fronts and backs from TSR, these colors match the screenshots a bit better.

[Cure]

Don't forget trainer sprites



St. Anne/pokemarts/pokecenters/overworld sprites might also be worth revamping. The tile sets for the rest of the game are fairly simple and repetitive.

So is this just restricted to red/blue, or are green and yellow sprites under review as well?