June Update:

Oi Oi Gamedev and or Gamer!

Welcome to an update on things that have been happening and things yet to happen. :)

As you know i am currently working on the 'Medieval' assets themes. A few characters have been created so far but not many tile sets have been since i started the characters. i have been looking back on what tile sets there are and look to see what i can bring in. I know i wanted to bring tile sets that would accompany certain characters within the theme, a bit like a 'play set' i suppose, is the way i look at it. :)

Now, the first thing i see was the 'Castle' tile set. But whilst looking i noticed i couldn't find an 'SMS' version uploaded, nor could i find one inside all my asset files. This left a scratching my a head, why didn't i do it?, did i do it and some how lost it? strange. But instead of getting bogged down on the whys and wheres i decided to just do another one.

So this months release is the 'Castle' tile set, this for ALL formats, SMS, NES & Gameboy.

Normally i would say that it wouln't normally take me a month to create a tile set, but it's been so long since i made one i wasn't sure how i used to do them so i came at it with a different approach this time around.

The first tile set was just worked on in a small area and adapted, but this time and went full hog an designed levels themselves. I wanted to see how the tile set would look if put together into something that looks like a full level, and see what variations would come from it. 

For this i wanted to have three levels, ground floor, upper floor, and top floor.

Heres how it looks in a GIF:.

After designing a fairly reasonable 'Level' or 'Rooms', the biggest challenge was getting all this to fit inside a 128x128 canvas, which is known as the 'Bank', which is how much memory these consoles have for graphics, 128x128 bank for backgrounds(tile set) and 128x128 for sprites.

This is where a lot of things get removed, tweaked, added modified as i try and keep as much as possible in the original designed tile set and not lose to much, but sadly that's the nature of the beast. It's only at this sort of stage you become to realise what the designers of games had to come up against when working on these retro consoles for games. Its a constant battle of compromise and sacrifice which in turn can, and i would say does, effect the overall game, not just looks, but gameplay mechanics and story lines as well. It's all good and well when a game designers says i want this, this and this for my game, its then down to the team to do their best to make it happen, but limitations and restrictions can make it difficult, but not impossible, but only for compromises to be made which in the end may not be what was provisionally envisioned because there's not enough graphics space to accomplish was was first designed. So next time you see a poor looking retro game, don't assume its a rubbish graphic artist, instead think that things may look the way they do because of something else that is going on in game and a compromise had been made. :)

OK, everything you see in the animated GIF that represents all three floors of a castle do fit indie a 128x128 graphic canvas. :)

Moving on....

Characters:

Sadly no character release this month. As mentioned above the tile set got away from me a little, but that's not the only reason. I have been working the new characters, which would of been the 'Royal Servants', well, still is, i'm am still working on them, but something came to my attention whilst working with them.

Creating what i have so far, characters with weapons such as, Sword, Shield, Battle Axe's etc etc, is all good, but when it comes to the 'Royal Servants' it kinda got me thinking that would these certain characters need such weapondry? Well, yes maybe, if were talking about a 'Player' character, perhaps they might be in disguise and have this sort of weapondry in their inventory as an example. But what about if its NOT a 'Player' character. What if its just an NPC. A character that just walks around and does their 'job', whatever that may be. 

A cleaner, someone who sweeps the floor:

or Mop's the floor:

Right now all my characters a geared towards a 'Player' character, and let's be honest, not all characters in game are playable, especially when it comes to RPG genre type games. So i need to change my thinking a little bit here and think about NPC 'states' as well as player states in terms of animations and equipment/weapons. Id like ALL my characters to have a comprehensive set of animations that cover most things, especially for Player and NPC and for Game devs to have a choice one way or another.

It would be impossible for me to know what the expectations are for a character when i make my releases, so i will release what i feel is necessary given the character, and any other 'additions' the game dev wants to make they will be able to make via the '8 bit Character Creator' that i am currently developing.

This is a big under taking i know, but one i'm confident i can do. I'm still working things out on how the best way to approach this is, so there is a lot of experimentation going on right now. The 'Royal Servants' characters may be a little delayed but when they are complete i will be more so along with putting things together alongside the 8 bit character creator.

The vision is that you will be able to creator your own characters based on my RPG characters. Give them clothing, equipment, weapons and have extensive animations that fit whatever they have equipped for either player or NPC. :)

So far with the 8 bit Character Creator i have added the characters that are available now, added the newer 'Light Skinned' characters(not released any) and added custom skin tone characters.

i don't have anything tangible to show you as yet but as soon as i do i will let you know. :)

OK, Thanks everyone for being here and your support.

Il catch you next month, any questions that give me a shout over on Discord. :0

All the best,

Chaser :)