Topic: Game Creation Techniques

[TheouAegis]

It's been said you shouldn't try to simplify things before you actually make anything because in the end you'll make things worse, but that's also probably why so many games these days waste resources. In many cases you can tile something that normally wouldn't be thought of as tiled. Take the image in question and apply an 8x8 grid over it. Look for ANY tiles that are duplicated. Don't see any? Consider reducing the color count or changing some tiles so they're duplicated. If that's not an option and you can't break it down, then go ahead and use the full image.

And games these days ARE wasteful. Programmers don't take the time they need to to optimize their space and coding. Everyone nowadays has the destructive mentality that since the media can hold larger ROMs, there's no need to optimize the ROMs. For sprite rippers, it's nice because it's easier to align sprites, but moving from ripping NES and SNES sprites to ripping GBA and DS sprites, it's become apparent how wasteful designers have gotten. In GeGeGe Kitarou on the GBA, if the programmers optimized their sprites, they could have freed up possibly 32kb or more. That might not sound like much, but in terms of graphics memory that is a  lot.

[Corpsecrank]

I been pretty much picking out patterns found in full background and selecting that area and popping it out into a separate sheet. Anything that doesn't follow the standard patters I see gets pulled as is and tossed onto the sheet. That does mean floors walls stairs and more are all repeated tiles while odd objects found here and there are a lot larger. Should make a large difference but it is extremely tedious. I had to much trouble with tile viewers etc and wasn't able to pull the tile sheets straight from the rom. So it's all photoshop and full backgrounds right now while I pull them apart. It's enough to make you cry doing this but the payoff in the end is probably worth it.