Pixel Challenge 3: GBC Game!

[Perihelion]

This week, you must make tiles using GBC restrictions! It should be in a top-down perspective akin to Zelda or an RPG, but subject matter beyond that is up to you. Like last week, character sprites are heavily encouraged but not required, and you can make any number of tiles and/or sprites that you want. The deadline this time is March 20, so get pixeling!

I'm tossing ideas around for the next challenge, and so far I have an underwater scene or sprite animations. I'm taking other suggestions, too. What do you guys want to see?

GameBoy Color Information
I'm not going to get too anal about making sure all of the technical restrictions are absolutely correct, so for the purpose of this challenge, the GBC restrictions are as follows:

• No more than eight sprite palettes, each consisting of four colors (3+transparency).
• No more than eight tile palettes, each consisting of four colors.
• GBC tiles are 8x8. However, most games did actually use 16x16 tiles for the most part with smaller ones interspersed to break up the grid or add detail or whatever.

Also note that GBC resolution is 160x144 if you're inclined to make a full mockup.

References





More from Star Ocean: Blue Sphere can be found here.








Last Challenge

Congrats to piggman for winning last week's competition! Feast your eyes on his beautiful pixels:

 

[WeebamNa]

By no posts in this thread I assume everyone is too busy working on their GBC screens to be bothered to make a post...? ...Right...? Well, I just wanted to say that I plan on submitting something for this challenge; just don't have anything to show yet. Thought I'd give this a bump and maybe spark some more interest into people. BTW piggman, that desert scene looks great, congrats!

 

[Perihelion]

Well, this challenge is pretty hard. I tried to keep it fairly open and RPG-like to maintain some comfort zone, but yeah, hopefully people will submit stuff. If no one does, I'll just do something more freeform next week.

 

[zchin]

Hmmm, this looks like something I'm interested in, but I'm a bit confused with the palette requirements, so eight palette's for the sprite and tiles, which means I can use up to 36 colors for the sprite and tiles?

Thank you and have a nice day!

 

[Perihelion]

32, actually. And yeah. In GBC games, there are no second layers or transparency for tiles, so each 8x8 square must have only four colors. And the sprites can only have three colors. There are various tricks that will let you have more by stringing multiple sprites together, though.

 

[mawk]

a palette in this case means the set of four colours (three for a sprite) that you use on any given tile. different tiles and different sprites can have different palettes, but you can only have a maximum of eight different palettes for the tiles, and another eight for the sprites.

it sounds like a pretty tight restriction, but it's actually not that bad.

 

[Perihelion]

Mawk, you better make something!

 

[mawk]

ok

also ffff stop answering questions before me >:[

 

[DeM0nFiRe]

Am I missing something or is it 8 * 3 (sprites) + 8 * 4 (tiles) Which is 46 colors total?

 

[Perihelion]

I meant 32 for tiles and 32 for sprites, and that includes transparency.

 

[mawk]

oh, forgot to mention: for those of you who wanna make their mockup as true to the source material as possible, Pro Motion could be a handy tool. it allows you to limit your selection of colours to the 15-bit palette used by the GBC (by reducing the bit depth of all channels from 8 to 5). it's not free, but there's a fully-functional 30-day trial which should at least be enough for this contest.

keeping 100% to the GBC's hardware capabilities isn't one of this challenge's big concerns, though, so don't worry about it if you don't want to.

 

[danyo34]

Well I guess I'll post to say that I'm entering too, but I have something to put up for critique.

 

[Xilef]

Damn, I regret deleting my gameboy-themed tileset now.

Never heard of starocean before, but those graphics look sweet for GBC.

 

[Star]

Damn, I regret deleting my gameboy-themed tileset now.

Never heard of starocean before, but those graphics look sweet for GBC.

Are you kidding me? Star Ocean is great, you should look it up on youtube and see if you like it. But Star Ocean Blue Sphere was bogus, cause there is no translation and never will be. Tried playing it, and never got far cause it was too hard to understand.

So like, I'm not really too sure about the rules, I tried reading but I got further questions that maybe stupid to ask. What do you mean by a limited amount of colors? Do we just pick 32 colors that we want to use in our tileset or do you pick the colors? What program would we use to make the resolution match? Definitely not RPG Maker XP or VX right? What do we win? Fame, Glory? New pencils? I need some pencils.

 

[Ratty524]

Question: Do you just want the layout of the map, or do you care if character sprites are put into the work we create?

 

[mawk]

putting characters in the map is heavily encouraged, but not required.

StarGGundam, you probably won't be using an rpg maker program for this. if you blew up the tiles to the right size, it might be handy for putting them all together, but this competition is mainly about spriting a mockup.

 

[Tindy]

I really wanna try this one :D

Now I gotta get working

hup hup

 

[action]

I think I'll start doing these, starting with this one.
To work :I

 

[Perihelion]

@danyo: Woo, our first WIP! Looking nice, but I might simplify the floor shading, maybe get rid of the black.

@xilef: Even if you had kept it, you would have to sprite something new, not use an existing tileset.

@StarGGundam: You pick any colors you want. And when you make a mockup, you're probably going to want to do it in whatever pixel art program you normally use. If you want to make it actual GBC-sized, make the mockup 160x144. As for what you win, you get a shiny userbar until someone dethrones you in the next competition.

@Ratty: As mawk said, characters are encouraged.

 

[piggman77]

Alright, finally getting some time to work on this tonight. Please tell me if I'm doing this the right way, with the contest limitations and all.

WIP: