The Retro RPG Challenge 2

[Peppermint Pig]

Hey everybody, this week we're carrying on the GBC based RPG challenge!

There are several goals here!

1. Create at least 4 monster battle sprites/images. The requirements are the same as the last time: You can only use up to 4 colors per tile and a maximum of eight 4 color palettes. These are SPRITES, not Tiles, so one color will always be transparent, which in other words will mean white, so you could make use of it! Your sprites cannot be larger than 48x48. If you want to create a hero for the battle scene, you're welcome to do that, though it's not obligatory!

2. Create an overworld hero (if you haven't done so in the last challenge), and at least 2 overworld sprites to represent any of the monsters you've created. You must create at least a 2 frame walking animation of each at 8x8 or 16x16 in size. For an additional challenge, create 4 facings for the overworld sprites!

3. create at least one visual effect, such as magic. This effect can only use 1 palette and must be treated like a sprite (1 color is transparent), but it can be any size and of any number of frames.

Like last time, you can work with one partner. Perhaps someone wants to design the sprite outlines, and another person would like to color them! Feel free to get collaborative in this challenge!

Here are some samples!!!

Dragon Warrior III GBC:


Dragon Warrior Monsters 2, Tara's Adventure:


Lufia, The Legend Returns:


I will be acquiring animation samples very soon, as well as more samples in general, so please feel free to start the static portions of this activity!

[Darion]

How many colors can the interface be? Also, can we animate the monsters?

[Peppermint Pig]

The interface can be treated like tiles or sprites, though most games tend to use some font set so they need  room, and simplicity to clearly display information.

As for animating the monsters, that's fine!

[flaber]

you said that when animating it has to be atleast 2 frames. Whats the maximum?

Also, are there specific colours that we pick from? Does GBC have specific colours we need?

[Pawige]

I believe the answer to the color choice question was answered by Ptoing in part 1, you should have to use 15bit but that seems to be a pretty rare color-depth (I.E., not supported by many programs), so it's probably not quite worth the effort. I've actually had that exact problem developing for 15 bit cell-phones.

Overworld sprite:

Battle sprite for enemy:

The rest are in production still.

[ptoing]

I doubt that the monsters on those battlescreens are sprites at all, as the GBC can only display 40 at once and only 10 per line. So it is more likely to be backgroundtiles. Another thing about background priority: Each 8x8 bg character can has a priority setting, either infront or behind sprites. This always goes for the entire 8x8 tile not just parts of it.

Pawige: ProMotion can handle any bitdepth settings from 2,2,2 to 8,8,8 RGB. You can even have 3,3,2 and stuff like that, which would be good for mophun (urgh).

[eghost]

Perhaps I'm missing something but some of the examples seem to have more colors than they should for this challenge

Is it possible that they are overlaying sprites on top of bg tiles to create the final sprite image? It only seems to be the case in the first and last screen cap from DWM II and the screen cap from Lufia...

That said, and if it is the case...Can we make use of that technique?
Just curious...Thanks

[Peppermint Pig]

I think they are all sprites. In the lufia example, yeah, they may be overlaying images on top of one another, so they have the red parts of the slime, then the yellow and brown overlayed, but they must have transparency in order to safely combine...

DW monsters does not appear to overlap, so I don't see what you mean. They use multiple palettes per monster, but they're creatively working around the 8x8 tile limit.

[Sawtooth]

Pawige: your overworld sprite is absolutely fantastic.  On the vampire battle sprite, the areas around his hands are kind of confusing.  I'd make the elbows jut out to the sides a little so the foreshortening isn't so extreme.  Other than that, it's gooooood.

I'll start working on my entry once I get settled in to my dorm room, and they start handing out the laptops.

[Pawige]

Huzzah! Done for now.

Skeleton:


Beholder/Crab:


Vampire (arms might be a bit too much now :-P):


Drake:


Fugly Spell Effect


The Hero in 4 directions:


Step-by-step creation of the drake (tail was an afterthought):


Crits needed for everything!

[Darion]

Nice. You could not make the drake's wings look so rough though, compared to the rest of its body.

[pixel32]

The Hero in 4 directions(right direction just reversal the left direction)   

[Peppermint Pig]

Pawidge: I'm not sure about the head on the skeleton, but the tiny sprite version is awesome. On the beholder battle image, I think the shadow color could be lighter. Then again, maybe we just need to see these things on some nice backgrounds??? Your drake is probably the best. Nice texturing. The vampire is also very slick, and the small sprite resembles it very well. I prefer the animated small beholder type monster to the large one.. maybe it's the warmer coloring.


pixel32, your character has too many colors. It should be 3 colors + 1 transparent. It's a good design, though.

[Pawige]

Improvements to the two Pep mentioned.





Darion: About the drake's wings, I tried removing the dithering, but that didn't look very good on the relatively large space, so I just left it there.

Is there anyone else working on this challenge? It was pretty fun to do and I'm feeling lonely in this thread...

[eghost]

I'm workin' on it too, just haven't had much time as of late to crank it out...Still workin' on part one of the challenge also...Hopefully I'll be able to put soemthin' up over the weekend...

Sweet lookin' sprites BTW Pawige...

[di0xygen]

heres my first monster much imspirarion came from pawige

Thanks a lot for the idea of doing small sprite for each monsters 

[Razz]

Here are the enemies:

Demi

Pisspudle

Rawrasaur

Stargrief
Hero:

Effect:

[Schu]

Well I don't have much free time anymore, but I managed to get this done today. The battle system is heavily influenced by Star Ocean, only without the mindless AI teammates that use their skills when you least need them and watch you die when you do.



They're very eager slimes.

[edit] Now with interface. The gem guage is like the PB blast in PSO, but you can equip different gems to give your sword different skills. When it fills up, your TP guage is activated and you can use skills until drained, kind of like in Ys VI. It rises as you fight and won't disappear after battle, so you can decide to waste your skills on silly slimes or save it for the boss. (Naturally it should reset when you leave the dungeon area).
---Schu

[Darion]

I love you, Schu.

[Helm]

Indeed much love.

[PoV (aka DrgnMaX)]

Wow, that would have been a killer looking RPG on the GBC there Schu.  It's a shame though, the real GBC has this awful 10 8-pixel-wide sprite per horizontol line limit, that would glich that sequence of yours.

[Schu]

I don't really know how the GBC works but Star Ocean Blue Sphere seems to work fine like that Check it out here. Maybe it's just the magic of Enix...

[PoV (aka DrgnMaX)]

That's pretty cool.  You'll note how the floor where they battle is one color.  They sneak either the player or enemy sprites (or both) in to the background, and use the odd sprite for overlapping the top or bottom.  It's quite clever.

[am_pm]

My feeble attempt:



Could be better, but meh.

[Joseph]

?  over a year ago dude...be sure to check topic/reply dates.

[Ryumaru]

atleast he posted some art, retro rpg challenge 1 has a slightly recent post( this year atleast).
am_pm: youre guy uses 1 color too many.

[Akzidenz]

The nice thing about people digging up old threads is that new posters like me get to see them.

Mods, have you ever thought about implementing a "greatest threads" section with older threads like this one? I'm sure there are a bunch of great old threads, but I can't browse through a year's worth of indexes to find them. And it probably wouldn't be too difficult to implement.

[Panda]

Mods, have you ever thought about implementing a "greatest threads" section with older threads like this one? I'm sure there are a bunch of great old threads, but I can't browse through a year's worth of indexes to find them. And it probably wouldn't be too difficult to implement.

I suggested Ptoing once or twice making a "Best of the year" kind of thread with links to all the best/most interesting threads from each year. But the idea just slept there.
I guess with some elbow grease and help from some member suggestions it could work.

[Akzidenz]

I suggested Ptoing once or twice making a "Best of the year" kind of thread with links to all the best/most interesting threads from each year. But the idea just slept there.
I guess with some elbow grease and help from some member suggestions it could work.

I don't know if there's any way I can help with that - but it's a feature I'd love to see, so if I can help at all, let me know.

[am_pm]

atleast he posted some art, retro rpg challenge 1 has a slightly recent post( this year atleast).
am_pm: youre guy uses 1 color too many.

Darn. I didn't think black was considered one of the colors.

[Ryumaru]

yep, always. by colors, i specifically mean pallette entries. using 5 shades of 3 different colors or hues wouldnt work. you could have 4 pallette entries in the sprite, but the background color would have to be one of them and the sprite wouldnt be transparent.

[Greenwing]

I'd love seeing "greatest threads" and I would love posting in this one to to revive... it you guys wouldn't mind about that sort of necromancery.

[Panda]

As long as you are contributing to the thread, I see no problem with bumping old threads.

[ptoing]

As long as you are contributing to the thread, I see no problem with bumping old threads.

Here in the Challenges & Activities Forum at least. Bumping anywhere else is BAD, generally.