Darkest Dungeon NES Demake

[EyeCraft]

Hi everyone, it's been a long time since I've been in the pixel scene. It's really good to see the forum is looking better than ever! I'm back with something that's been gnawing at the back of my mind for the last few days - a darkest dungeon NES demake! Haven't done any art or pixelling in a long time so I'm pretty slow off the starting line... bear with me

I can't emphasise how much I adore this game. I felt that the prevalence of black inking in the game's art style would lend itself well to NES's requirement for tiles to share a common colour, so I began playing around. This is all very much WIP, but here's where I'm currently at:



All the sprite palettes are used, and 3 of the background palettes are used. There's also a silly amount of sprite per scanline... but I guess it would work if we rendered each pair of characters once per 4 frames? 

Here is the background in isolation. This is really the part of the piece I am unsatisfied with. I began by painting the piece as a whole and then began merging sections down into tiles. It is currently around 180 tiles I think; ie too damn many.



Link to the reference I've been using. Not all the player characters are the same, I've grabbed some others from other places.

So what are your thoughts? How you all doing? 

[LeafyMystic]

I love it! Huge fan of the game myself. I love anything Victorian/Lovecrafty really. I see what you mean by tiles and the style is perfect. The simplification and GBA elements make the game feel even more classic and like, Halloween-like, if that makes sense. Something I noticed though, minor detail: the roof to the well, because it's missing the outline on that primary vertical line on the left, it feels like a piece of the art got clipped.

[surt]

Looks awesome, but aways from fitting well with NES restrictions.
Max of 64 sprites total and 8 sprites per scanline, means all the HUD wouldn't be feasible as sprites (eg. Mega Mans use just a single sprite wide vertical health bar for sprite-based HUD) and all those character sprites and on the same scanlines would mean a lot of flickering.
I'd move all the HUD to background tiles.
If the characters mostly don't move you could move the inactive ones to the background and just use sprites just for the active ones.