Spectrum Computing

redballoon wrote: ↑Fri May 04, 2018 9:31 pm Found another lot of all unused graphics. This time from a shmup.

The mountains look great. It's cool to have 2-4 large tiles that can be repeated in any order (or maybe 1 big and a couple of half-sized ones) so that they're not blatantly looping in the background. Then you can just about afford the memory to pre-shift them in their entirety. What you would need though is for the furthest right and left 8 pixels of each tile to match up so that they still tile when pre-shifted.

A long time ago I tried to write a shoot-em-up with UDG-based sprites, accelerated a bit with machine code. I've long since lost it as it would have been on tape or wafadrive.

Anyway, I designed some similar looking sprites to those (inspired by C64 stuff like IO and DELTA where ships are always flipping over) but using 3x3 characters. This let me use the paper colour to set a coloured orb in the centre of the sprite about which the outer part rotates. I'd use white ink with e.g. red paper in the centre cell, then there'd be three pixels in an 'L' shape set in each corner, then four white pixels alongside it in the adjacent character cells. It looked like a red ball with a 1-pixel white outline, which was pretty neat. Then the rest of the sprite was animated around that.

This is the sort of thing I used to sketch - you'll have to imagine it animated to flip over. Original version on the left, stippled and detailed to the right, depending on how organic or techy you want it to look. Not sure if the use of BRIGHT adds anything . Maybe the first one was better all just brilliant white.


Being character-based, the idea was to re-use parts of this basic enemy design for other types of craft, e.g. different coloured cores, C-shaped craft, craft with fixed cockpits and rotating mid-sections, or using the middle frames of the flipping animation for side-on-ring ships banking up/down.

Joefish wrote: ↑Fri May 11, 2018 5:25 pm ...


Being character-based, the idea was to re-use parts of this basic enemy design for other types of craft, e.g. different coloured cores, C-shaped craft, craft with fixed cockpits and rotating mid-sections, or using the middle frames of the flipping animation for side-on-ring ships banking up/down.

You do realize, that now, you have to find the missing graphics and/or remake them into an animated GIF right ?

Some more participants, would be nice.

Go fetch some from the dust trunk

Mine:

https://sites.google.com/site/zxgraph/h ... kas/scraps

This "Multicolor Editor" needs to be finished

RMartins wrote: ↑Mon May 14, 2018 9:17 pm This "Multicolor Editor" needs to be finished

I agree. Even though ZX-Paintbrush is the gold standard for multicoloured graphics I'd still like to see a Spectrum designer.

So many things, not enough time

Einar Saukas wrote: ↑Mon May 14, 2018 9:03 pmhttps://sites.google.com/site/zxgraph/h ... kas/scraps

Love the Q*Bert setup.

Still hoping for some more participation/sharing.

Here is a laughing skull, that was meant to be used on SteelBall Game Over condition.



I have a few more skull experiments, but I haven't converted the SevenUp files into animated gifs yet.

EDIT: Here are some more variations.



NOTE: These could also be used on that pirate game I mentioned before.

And here is a character for another game, in the idle/tired loop.



NOTE: Timing between frames was not "polished" yet, they all take the same time (200ms), which doesn't work as it was supposed to.
This makes it look too fast, instead of having 2 phases, speed up and slow down.

The shoulders/upper arm also need some extra movement.
The belt, needs one extra pixel of movement too.

RMartins wrote: ↑Tue May 29, 2018 9:14 am

Nice. I like this one best, the shading on the lower jaw works. I never really nailed skulls, I always felt the need to give them 2 nostrils and if it's 16 pixels wide it's difficult to avoid a cartoony appearance.

Here is a minor update.



NOTES:
Left = 0riginal
Right = A few pixels and frame timming reviewed.
Center = A look animation I had laying around.

And here is another one, turning left.

I've been working on some retro graphics myself, trying to get my game idea off the ground.

Digging through old stuff, here's a shmup mock-up made for someone on Twitter but don't think it was ever used.

Player ship is by @redballoon