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Top Pixel Art - January 2014 (#4)
Hehe Renegade (and Barbarian also) was my favourite game on ZX Spectrum, and you bring me it back, thanks for this) By the way, couple weeks ago i found a game Friends of Ringo Ishikawa (inspired by Technos games), and it was pretty cool too) Looking forward your game!
Sorry for the "late" comment, but that's great. I did not find information about the game on your site, was it released?
So very much of this is polished and has a great overall vibe. Funny how much blood, sweat, and tears goes into something that just lasts a few seconds. Very good work.
Wow...this is really incredible. All of those smooth animations must've taken ages to make!
So cool. I've always wanted to do something like this... : )))
I really love this, very glad to see it again and progressing
I think there should be a shop in the background that clearly sells denim jeans. And that same shop should appear many times both to reuse tiles in memory but also as an in-joke that the reason everybody is wearing denim jeans is that's simply all that is available to purchase in this town in regards to legwear. :P
The pixels and animations are fantastic, and right down to the setting it looks really contemporary.
You guys might have tried this already, but to slow the walk down you could try updating position only on every second frame. Jumps etc would still be updated every frame. That'll cut walking speed effectively by half but it might be too slow, ymmv. Also, if you still want to experiment with shadows, there's a trick you could try - add shadows into walking frames and such, but for jumps or launches, have the game draw a separate shadow sprite instead. You'll save some power since the shadow sprite is only displayed on demand. This method is used on NES to great effect, for ex. in Turtles 2.
It is a gif that I created in Paint Shop Pro for the programmers, to show how the game will play and look.
Heh, yeah my CPC game has the standard enemies with the same leg sprites as the player (storyline excused by them all being from the same prison ship so the trousers and boots are their standard prison uniform) and the jump frames are just re-using a couple of frames from the run cycle. I find it strange the second player is a woman, because her slimmer legs must surely be using up a lot more memory than if it was another guy.
I don't know about too many sprites being that big an issue going by some games I've played on CPC. Must be some trickery but I've seen games seemingly move loads of sprites around with relative smoothness. But yeah probably best to work to a limit first and then add in what you can cram in at the end if any speed or memory is available.
So is this an actual gif videocapture of the game running in an emulator? Also is it easy to recolour sprites on the go? I ask mainly wondering if the totally white sprites seen in various moves are recoloured in realtime or are seperate sprites.
The characters were originally going to have shadows which would have to be drawn on the leg sprites itself (cant have separate shadows as that would be too many sprites and CPU drain), but I realised that it would look funny if they dropped off objects/higher ground when walking, along with complications when they are jumping..
There wont be any shadows on the sprite and will be removing the ones that are there. This demo is actually 4 minutes long (nearly 4000 frames which also shows the weapons, bossfight amongst other gameplay mechanics) so this clip here only shows the first few hundred frames.
In regards to the walk cycle, the leg animations are being re-used for a multitude of combat animations and not just walking, as frame optimization is still a concern for me at the moment. The characters will be skating around, but they cant move any less than 4 pixels as that will be the speed of scrolling. This is why the characters look fast on the walk.
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Dunno about that. I play those games often (mostly Final Fight, Streets of Rage 2 & the D&D games since they're on PS3 as well which is what I game on the most) but I find the walk cycle here extremely slidey. Just wish they'd lift their feet and knees up a bit so they don't walk like how I do when I'm in a supermarket (yeah I get bored in those places and slide about on the floor. Sometimes after pushing a trolley I'm holding so the inertia of it carries me along). Anyways it's the only thing that bugs me about the feel of the character movement. The actual combat looks great and has a nice satisfying feel of impact even without sound effects.
Hm. One thing I've just noticed. Why do shadows appear sometimes but not often?
Cool CPC visuals, great animation and moves, I agree with what has been said previously about the sliding motion as the main characters walk, however I believe this only adds to the overall retro feel, check out Cadilacs and Dinosuars, Alien Storm, Final Fight and D&D arcade games, this sliding motion always occurs, ecspecially when the player is being moved on by the system between encounters. I love it........there I said it and I aint ashamed, BBP's (Big Beautiful Pixels) are sexy!!
Awesome! Someone mentioned earlier that it looks like the characters are sliding and I have to agree. But the rest... hnnnggg, so good! Especially the fighting moves. They look really cool and fluid. I've never heard of that screen shaking trick before. Sounds neat.
Incredible animation work! I'll play the * out of this when you release it.
Fantastic! I'm not really a fan of the skating walk cycle but everything else is wonderful!
Yeah. I've been trying to go through my projects things and see what I should make '128k only' for when trying to fit things onto a 64k machine. And very few things may have to just be capable on an emulator running with '256k memory' mode. Still, trying to work round these things is one of the fun things about it. And I've been doing things like you been doing here with the reusing leg animations. Recycling stuff already in the memory is a great trick.
By the way some CPC games do a screen shake fine. Turrican II does a super crazy one.
Thanks for comment guys! It's very encouraging as it's been a rather tricky and time consuming project.
@CELS: The screen shake will be represented by a black line at the bottom bouncing up and down. To make the CPC do a proper screen shake would be too much processing.
@faliureboy: Dont worry! The girl has FAARRR more moves than what's shown:)
@Carnivac: Yeah - the memory is something that the programmers and I wont find out until we try. But I decided to animate everything that I would of wanted and then we'll just have to discard what we cant fit into memory.
Incredible!
Love the part when he sits on the guy and punch him in his face...never seen that before in a beat'em up. =D
That looks amazing (the animations especially)! Like Double Dragon, but better :)
This is fucking awesome. Literally what I said aloud. :)
Was wondering how this was going as I found an old image of it on my computer I must have saved a while ago. I really envy your animation skills. I do think the walk cycle looks a little 'slidey' but overall the animation is great.
By the way I think the GIF format screwed up somewhere. There's some 1x1 black pixels appearing on the legs for example.
Also wondering how this is all going to fit memory-wise on a real CPC. It's something I've been having to take into consideration with my projects.
cool that one of them is a girl, though she seems to have less moves...
Oh my god, this is perfect! I missed seeing your fantastic animations. This is getting me all nostalgic from my time playing Streets of Rage when I was a kid.
So awesome! Congrats. 
I particularly like the sidekick animation of both characters. But is there intended to be some screenshake here that only shows as a black line at the bottom?
Extremely nice! Puts you right in the mood to play some retro classics.
Brilliant!
Haha! I need to play it. I need it badly. Kickass animation - raw power and awesomeness.