New Game Ideas

[OmegaMax]

I use Grafx2 for amiga and pc engine development as it reminds me of deluxe paint.

Get it here
http://pulkomandy.tk/projects/GrafX2

[Roysterini]

I've used ProMotion for years, but my new fave is Aseprite.

Both are great though. Aseprite now has a wide pixel mode.

[saulc12]

wow. when i can ask.. which software you use for creating graphics with c64 restrictions? thank.

Charpad, Spritepad and GangEd2 depending and whether I am working on characters/tiles/maps, sprites or bitmapped images.

[saulc12]

Finally got back to working on my Chaos Engine inspired game assets - the game would be titled 'Playing God' and there will be more to come, but for now here are the latest graphics (all background work was redone from scratch after I finally started working on the sprites).

[Gorack]

Love your sprites.

I have been working on actually converting Chaos Engine to the 64.

[Matt]

woah, I'd love to see the chaos engine being ported to the c64! is it actually possible?
great work btw!

[Lasse]

Holy crap! AGSP bitmap scrolling possibly finally put to good use

[cybermodo]

woah, I'd love to see the chaos engine being ported to the c64! is it actually possible?
great work btw!

Yeah, wonderfully idiosyncratically blocky in C64's special way.
Perhaps some hires chars may be deployed as well?

Here is something interesting for ZX, hope I am not being off topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFaUth_DKoQ

[saulc12]

Love your sprites.

I have been working on actually converting Chaos Engine to the 64.

https://postimages.org/

https://postimages.org/

https://postimages.org/

https://postimages.org/

Looks like that will be very challenging having to shift so much data around. My own idea is a little less ambitious and more of a Chaos Engine inspired rip-off, but that allows me the freedom to do everything for the c64 from scratch, control over maps, colour usage and so on.

How did you convert the chaos engine background graphics and sprites?

Looks quite effective if a little in need of a clean up in places, certainly the forest part look excellent.

[Gorack]

woah, I'd love to see the chaos engine being ported to the c64! is it actually possible?

Probably not for an exact port. Maybe come close. I could come a lot closer on a c128.

Holy crap! AGSP bitmap scrolling possibly finally put to good use

Yeah its AGSP with the top panel made up of sprites. During the AGSP loops I can update two colour registers.
The bottom white bar down the bottom is a text scroller also made of sprites (going to be used as a replacement for all the speech).

Developed Pi1541 so I could test it on real hardware as its a multi load and the loaders SD2IEC supports are just too memory hungry. Being AGSP everything needs to be small.

[mstr12345]

Wow! Looks good. Are you planning both modes: 1 player + cpu or 2 players?

[glirpi]

@saulc12, @Gorack amazing work! i like it so much!

and what about challenge to create custom graphics for iconic c64 boulder dash game? :) someone will join?

[Gorack]

How did you convert the chaos engine background graphics and sprites?

Sorry saulc12 we posted at almost the same time and I didn't see your post.

I use an art tool that I developed at work. It has gone through three major rewrites over the past twenty odd years and has been used for over fifty Gameboy, GBA and DS games for all kinds of publishers. The roots for how it works can be traced back to NES/SNES days of Melbourne House and possibly as far as their C64/Spectrum days. Traditional (and some modern) character based tools and art packages force you to draw a character set and then use those characters to draw the map (or tiles and then the map). This tool allows you to draw as a bit map and calculates the character/tileset from it in real time using hashing techniques. To draw in character mode or tile mode you set the drawing tools to snap to those pixel boundaries. The tool then works with pixels and palettes. Duplicate pixel image character data with differing colour data are not duplicated in the charset. I then took this tool converted it to draw in fat pixels and to have 128 palettes of 3 colours. As there are so many palettes the code can shuffle around the pixel and palette colours to better find data that are duplicates and hence compress the number of characters used. It can also find flipped characters (being AGSP it is possible to draw flipped characters). There are also tools to search and replace characters that almost look the same. This can be done palette independent as it it raw pixel data at this stage.

I learnt to program on a 64 and after so many years I wanted to go back and apply everything I learnt and see what I could achieve on it. Learning about AGSP I knew that 16bit looking games could be possible. So to set a challenge I took a 16bit game and set about seeing how far I could get. But not any old 16bit game a game that required an expanded 1MB system! On a 64 memory is getting tight. Some maps need to be split into two. With another 64K I know I could do it with full size maps, that is why I say I think it is possible for a c128.

The best image character converter that I have found in the last thirty years is iMage Studio's OptPix. It is way better than anything I can come up with and any academic paper I have found. I originally used this to convert the 16bit art into my art tool. At the time I created the art (about 3 years ago) I had an over two hour train trip each day where I would spend the time pushing pixels and programming. The forest levels have had the most work. I didn't do much on the sprites as an artist colleague of mine was promising to do them (but never did).

I will keep working on it but it is a long term goal. I'm currently spending all my free time supporting and enhancing Pi1541.

As for the art tool, you may find it in Unity one day, and if so, I will assure you I will put in the C64 mode

[saulc12]

Thanks for the insight, that answered my biggest question too as I had wondered how you would get a complete set of tiles, having looked at Chaos Engine many times myself and coming to the conclusion that a fairly direct conversion would require at least 1024 chars per world background set (hence me choosing to start from scratch although I still have a lot of work to do in cleaning up and adjustments to make for things like the tree trunks (scale is somehow wrong) and more varied rock forms. I think I am going in the right direction with the sprites but the background may yet be fully reworked as I am sure I can improve it significantly.

Your results look great if a little untidy in places and the sprites which I guess were scaled and then converted read surprisingly well, I do hope you keep the project going and keep us posted of progress. I will also keep an eye out for your tool appearing in Unity.

[Gorack]

a fairly direct conversion would require at least 1024 chars

When you take into account all the pickups and covers it comes out to about 1400. Using the techniques previously described I reduced it to around 800 without too much impact on graphical quality.