Lil' Guy Games

A little landscape I drew while the sun was out. Happy :)

Long time no see

timelapses 1 of 2

‘standalone’ pixel art (as in, pixel art that isn’t for games or animation) usually isnt my thing. i think it defeats the purpose

like, pixel art is a medium that’s used for exactly 3 reasons: nostalgia, as a stylistic shorthand to denote that a game should not be taken seriously and should be enjoyed as a video game-ass video game or as a method of simplifying animation and speeding up asset creation times

its a necessary evil sometimes especially for games with xty bit aesthetics with large menus or character portraits (where its sensible and even professional looking, but still a little doofy) though, so it does have its place

A common misconception when people attempt to create Game Boy aesthetic graphics is that everything can use 4 shades as well as transparency.

While it’s certainly true that the Game Boy can display 4 shades, the system actually has 3 programmable palettes, and that’s where things start to get different. The first is the background palette, which is opaque and uses 4 shades. The next two are sprite palettes consisting of 3 shades and transparency. What this means is that any fourth shade you’re attempting to use on a sprite will be regarded as transparency, and you’ll be left with a bunch of see-through pixels.

A natural follow-up question would be, is it possible to layer sprites and make use of all 4 shades on the Game Boy? The short answer is that yes, it is possible, but it comes with it’s own set of problems. Unlike other comparable systems, sprites have to be layered perfectly on top of one another, otherwise they won’t be written properly and the graphics will be a mess. Using Mega Man on the Nintendo as a visual example, you can see that his face isn’t layered perfectly onto any other sprite. Instead, it’s placed somewhere between a number of them, which is convenient for allowing it to only comprise a single sprite. If this were attempted on the original Game Boy, the face would need to take up 4 sprites instead to account for the perfect layering. This would mean wasting precious space and straining the already small sprite-per-line limit even further.

Getting graphics from your screen to the Game Boy is another interesting process as well. I’m sure when you look at the graphics above, you probably thought to yourself, “That’s not right, the shades are all off!”, and you’d be absolutely correct. That’s because these graphics are their non-paletted varients. In terms of development flow, an artist will give you the graphics you’d like to see in-game, and once inserted into the ROM, those graphics are converted into data and given indexed ‘raw’ colours. For example, Colour 0 = White, Colour 1 = Light Grey, Colour 2 = Dark Grey, and Colour 3 = Black. This will cause the colours to look out of place and bizarre.

shelter2088

just a pixel art

[ screen resolution ]

1440x900

720x450

←→　/ move

↑    ↓　/ elevator

space　/ talk

[ ver.0.0 ]

とりあえず学校を卒業するために急いでつくったもの

・ほぼやることがない

・はじまらないしおわらない

・諸事情にによる変なスタート地点

[BGM]

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