Spectrum Computing

Tricky. It'd be nice to see them moving. My first instinct is big, but it depends how the colour clash looks in action.

Background erasing looks horrid where there's a lot of pixels behind. Edit - colour clash looks horrid at the top too. Going big.

Voted the first option. 2 and 3 are more or less instances of the same thing. Unmasked printing looks easier on the eyes, but frankly I don't think you want more of that going on.

Not sure how feasible this is, but you might want to try keeping the default bullet size but making the black outlines wider.

I would go for big. I think its a tough game to port to the spectrum because of the limitations of the machine.

I voted for option 1 - make the pixels big.

It's not perfect and I believe we hit here some weak point of Zx Spectrum. It is really hard to display bullets on a detailed background so they don't get lost in a pixel mess. And in most cases you cant make them different colour as it would mean ugly attribute clash.

But in my opinion you can mix option 1 and option 3 - don't clear all 8x8 character with bullet but just make a wider mask around them - 2 or 3 pixels wide. It will make them stand out of the background. It's some kind of compromise that I believe would work the best.

Also remember that you are making this game for Spectrum users. What is unacceptable for average Joe from the street is acceptable for us We lived many years of our lives with our Spectrums and learnt to accept its weak points

I tend to like the first one best. Perhaps you can make your bullets like the Manic Miner's items, cycling item's ink from colour to colour, maybe just two colours would do instead of four as in MM or cycle only similar colours (greenish and blueish colours) or cycle between colours which don't cause clash. Blinking wouldn't have to be fast.

The usual trick is to avoid bullets crossing over differently colored backgrounds.

Since in your case, you can not avoid that, the best approach is to probably make it work, without color. i.e. like the old games did it when the play area was a single color.
Tipically using a larger Bullet, Margin or Edge on the Mask, which owrks well, when your background is dark (Black or Blue).

The main problem with the bullet changing FG color, is that the colored box surrounding the bullet is not always in the same place, can be up, below, to the left or right, which looks ugly.

Increasing the border, or giving it a double border, will still make it look like round dots, by avoiding the square look. Which is also practical, since you do not have to change the bullet looks, depending on direction it is travelling.

Also noticed, that in the first example, bullets are not dots, but look like rectangles, which would suggest they fly horizontally only, but the bullet sprays on screen suggest other wise.

So to simplify, I would go for dot round bullets, with larger masked borders, or larger interior/radius.

I think your biggest problem there is the background, not the bullets.

The Blue section is fine as that's done with PAPER, it's a fairly dark colour, and still has a light ink colour over it for the bullets to appear in.
The top of the screen is magenta INK on black PAPER, which is a much darker shade to pick things out on. If you look at a lot of Spectrum games that use simple colouring you see they mostly stick to White, Cyan, Yellow and (at a stretch) Green for light shades and Black or Blue for dark backgrounds, Red at a stretch and rarely Magenta.

What I'd suggest is either thinning out the clouds in the sky and drawing them with a lighter colour, or do them mostly with solid bands of Magenta PAPER with something lighter (e.g. White) INK for details. Then the bullets will appear in that White INK. Also, when you draw sprites over it, they can take on the PAPER colour and not look like such obvious cut-outs. Maybe draw the lower clouds in dark White and thicken them up before switching to an area of solid Magenta PAPER higher up with the White detailing continuing. I don't really know what could work as it's quite a contrast. Or just thin out the cloud edge detail and do it all in White and Cyan INK.

Also, if the INK colour is already White, Yellow or Cyan, it doesn't clash quite so badly if you force it to White where a bullet is drawn.

Excuse my ignorance. Is there a way to provoke a subtle colour clash just enough to not get confused with the sceneries? Perhaps flipping bright of the mask border? Wouldn't that cause less clash and make bullets more visible?
Another idea would be a subtle enlarge<->shrink animation.

I wonder how collisions are managed with so much hell of bullets

Edit:

See Technique 8 : https://speccyholic.tumblr.com/post/891 ... ret-weapon
I think this is what Ralf mentioned above. What about a mask which is made up of two thin lines? The inner one being black around the bullet sprite (or Technique 9 if possible) while the outside one to clash freely so the bullet can stand out.
Again I could be miaowing