You have given him / her the ability if needed). Keep in mind that the above palette list can be dynamic in the game, so if you have a lot of monsters on screen and you don’t have any spare palette slots available, you could always replace one of the slots you are not currently using temporary (this would be down to the coder to work out how to do this, but It’s a good idea to work out what you want your groups of palettes to be so you have a basic idea what you can / can’t do: You could, if needed dynamically swap out palettes without effecting the other elements in your game.It also allows you to use colour palette swaps on your sprites / tiles which will save you a huge amount of RAM and speed up your game development.You will find it a bit easier designing within set limits and it can be really entertaining trying to push the limits.It’s a case of learning to use what you have which comes with experience and experimentation. Every MegaDrive / SNES game sprite uses 16 colours for their graphics and a lot of these games still stand up to anything released now. Once you get used to the idea, you will find it makes your graphics easier to draw (looking through a palette of 16 colours is way quicker than a palette of 256) and it will make your overall design stronger for it.It will save a huge amount of memory having your graphics saved as 4-bit (16 colours) instead of 8-bit (256 colours). The process of splitting the palette up into groups of 16 groups of 16 palettes (16*16=256) has many advantages: Everything takes longer than you expect it too and a lot of people give up halfway through the game as it stops becoming fun but if can keep knocking stuff out at a fairly quick pace, it helps to keep your motivation up (this is also a reason for setting yourself milestones / to do lists, but that’s another topic).Įven though you can use 256 colours for your sprites / tiles, you are much better off limiting each sprite / tile to a palette of 16 colours. Note: I might go on a bit about speed of development, but it’s fairly important when making a game, as game development is bloody hard. Read better to the player and be quicker to draw. In general, there’s not much point using 8 shades of blue on the players jeans, when you could get away with 3 shades of blue (light, normal and dark). So that’s nice.īecause of this fairly limited colour depth thou, you’re not going to get that subtle level of shading in your graphics as you would on a modern PC game. Note: The Next basically uses the same colour depth as the PC Engine and Mega Drive console’s, but you can have 512 colours on screen at once (256 colours for the tile layer and 256 colours for the sprites) instead of 482 for the PC Engine and 64 for the Mega Drive. There are programs out there that will convert your graphics to the correct colour values for the Next, but I don’t like the idea of what I’ve designed been changed and I think you should be designing from the start with the correct / legal colours or else you can never be sure what the final output will be. So, as long as your RGB values are any of the above numbers, it should be a legal colour that the Spectrum Next can display. To make sure you are using the correct colours while you are drawing your pixels you could download the palette or as I prefer to use the following colour values. So, the Spectrum Next uses a 9 bit RGB palette which gives you a total of 512 possible colours to use, with 256 colours been useable on each layer (sprite layer and tile layer). This won’t teach you how to draw better pixel art, as there’s plenty of tutorials out there for that, but it will help in getting your pixel art in to a more friendly format for the Spectrum Next and hopefully better organized to save more memory for your game and make your coder’s life a lot easier. I’ll try to explain some of the less obvious technical reasons for doing the graphics a certain way. This document is designed to help the artist make better use of the Next abilities and hopefully will help to make your coders life a bit easier □
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