As many might already have understood, am trying to get back in both graphic work and music work (possibly also coding albeit simple); and when i did stumble in the indieretronews article showing the game by Dario Bongiorno (or Bongi as appears on Facebook). Dario did start to work on its game in the 90s but then dropped it – also due to Commodore demise.
Last year Dario decided to restart work on its game, and did ask for help in both graphic and music side. I offered myself to help him; thought was the right occasion to refresh my pixel art skills and to work in a genre – Fantasy RPG – that i usually did not touch.
First thing i proposed was the audio. Dario did let me know that space was tight. The game is programmed on AMOS and was already taking four disks. I give him some advices for optimization that took a while to be implemented, especially for the world map but now problems seems to be solved; however due to the still limited estate I decided to use micro instruments for the songs; beside the small space taken those also give a very distinctive footprint to the game atmosphere, with some reminescence of 8-bit RPGs on the NES and Sega machines.
Graphics speaking, the game was already doing a citation of games like Final Fantasy on the SNES: the way the panel and the fights are set up is indeed similar; using chiptunes enhance a bit the feeling, making you think to be in front of a PC-Engine rather than your miggy.
For the graphic overhaul i had an hard constraint about the palette; since Dario hardcoded it in the game, those were the colors I had to use; last 16 colors for the main character sprite and all others for the graphic environment and enemies. Fortunately colors were pretty versatile so had not too much problem.
The fighting screens have been redrawn too, and now have a better painting-like quality, despite the same palette.
Took me a while but i convinced Dario to change the map handling from using images to a tile system; that did help to reduce the game assets size considerably. I also pushed to have at least three sizes for the main character: a 16×16 sprite for browsing on the main map, a 32×32 for environments such as the village and others and a 48×48 for the fight scenes.
Now, due to the recent fatherhood of Dario [Congratulations again, by the way!], things might slow down a bit (real life gotta have priority), however we both are committed to continue work on the game and finish it. Stay tuned for more information!
Advertisements Share this:
