Topic: I made Mini-SpriteSheets (Trevor, Alucard, 3-color Leon, Sypha)!

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

This is using colors from the NES Palette, including the mask color (Thanks, Uzo).
This is the best you're gonna be able to do without using pure black, in my opinion.

[uzo]

What's the "easy way around it"?

In short; there are a select few colors that are near black enough to be the darkest color of the palette, and still stand out well against black.

My suggestion would be to use this palette for Leon; (see attached)

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

I see you chose the other Red.
That was my 2nd choice but I thought it'd look a little dark so I picked the other more purple-ish red.

[uzo]

Yeah, the NES never had a bright/middle red color. I also chose the darkest shade of the orange/brown column.

As a fun quip, Megaman used the red I chose for Rush and the purple you chose for Protoman. In Megaman 9 and 10, I believe they changed to the red I chose, only because they brightened the whole NES palette to where it became a better match.

@TheouAegis and anyone else interested...

Technical detail goodies;

From my understanding, the brighter palette that Megaman 9 and Megaman 10 used, along with the majority of emulators by default, is the color information based on the NES's internal color information. In other words, the NES's internal palette data suggested that is the color it will display. However by the time it gets processed and put out to to the TV screen, it seems a lot darker. This is the NES hardware, not the TV that is at fault.

I think there is a mild difference between the NES and the remade re-release NES console too, where the remade console was a tad brighter and different.

Attached is the palette that is about as close to a real NES TV output as you can get. I've always found emulators to look off. And I wasn't sure quite why. I kept thinking in the back of my mind that it just seems off for some reason. Not how I remembered it from my childhood. This is why. Emulators don't use the palette you'd expect to see from a real NES on a TV.

If you are serious about making this look right, and I wholly encourage it, then use the palette I have attached below. It will surely give your game an authentic retro look.

[crisis]

Dude, those sprites are excellent. I'd love to see those in a future release, I'm interested.

[TheouAegis]

Saved the palette. The most tedious part will be ripping the sprites again in the proper palette. "nearest color" never works if I just try to change palettes (when the palette is different). I probably just need to stop using YY-CHR for my NES ripping, since it saves the current 4-colors and Paintshop Pro reads/writes based on those whenever I try to change palettes. But it's such a convenient program since it was made with the NES in mind.

[uzo]

Just use a color replacer to recolor the sheets with it. No need to re-rip. Also what emulator do you use? I have palette files for fceu already made.

[TheouAegis]

FCEU here too.

And recoloring the sheets doesn't change the GM sprites. I'll have to reload the sprites into GM too.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

I'm confused now.
Are you making:

1. a homebrew PC game?
2. a homebrew Retro (NES-looking) PC game?
3. a ROM hack?
4. a ROM homebrew?

I'm lost as to what you're doing now.

[uzo]

FCEU here too.

See attached palette file. Remove the ".txt". I added .txt to the end so the forum will accept it as an upload.

And recoloring the sheets doesn't change the GM sprites. I'll have to reload the sprites into GM too.

No shit, but it's ridiculous to re-rip them just to change the colors. And why would that matter anyway? Don't you have a global palette?

[TheouAegis]

GM doesn't do global palettes. There will be a guideline I'll write up for my game outside of GM to help me remember what colors are use, but GM is a 32bit game and even worse lacks palette swapping functions. However, and this is one reason I typed up a script to search for and return the indexes of the NES palette, someone did make a slow script that replaces colors in sprites that I'm going to mess around with next month and see if it will allow me to create a default greyscale sprite sheet to work off of, although again, this would require me to consolidate my sprites (not too big of an issue, since the enemies are already in a custom sprite sheet with the NES palette). But some sprite sheets don't have an NES palette actually saved to their file info and some do but the palette is different. In my sample engine right now, the one I'm working on just to get the coding figured out and tweaked, I have, like, 3 different NES palettes -- FCEUS, YYCHR and one off the internet. Eventually I will have to get everything on the same page. And some of the sprite sheets I was using were wrong, from rippers either ripping from screenshots or using tile rippers but using 0D/0F as the mask color (THOSE COLORS ARE ALREADY IN USE IN THE SPRITES, DUMBASSES!!). >_>  Some rippers make me facepalm IRL.

@Jorges: homebrew retro. You can use my engine to make a non-retro-looking homebrew, but mine's going to be homebrew retro-looking.

[Inccubus]

nice stuff! I may have a use for some of these. ^__^

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

Sure Inccubus!  Feel free (just drop me a little line of credit if you use 'em).

Sypha is completed! 

Here are the sprites:



Sprites are as follows:
1A-Still/Walk2
1B-Walk1/ClimbUp1/ClimbDown1 (&3)
1C-Walk4
1D-Crouch/Landing2
1E-GroundStaffAttack1
1F-GroundStaffAttack2 (&3)
1G-CrouchStaffAttack2
1H-CrouchStaffAttack2 (&3)

2A-GroundMagicAttack1
2B-GroundMagicAttack2 (&3)
2C-ClimbUp2
2D-ClimbUp4
2E-StairUpStaffAttack1
2F-StairUpStaffAttack2 (&3)
2G-ClimbDown2
2H-ClimbDown4

3A-StairDownAttack1
3B-StairDownAttack2
3C-Damage
3D-Death
3E-Talking
3F-ShakingHands1
3G-ShakingHands2
3H-ShakingHands3

4A-ShakingHands4
4B-Statue/FallingFromPedestal1
4C-FallingFromPedestal2 (Landing)
4D-GroundMagicAttack2 (alternate frame 'cuz it looked nice)
4E-StairDownStaffAttack-alternate foot-frame1
4F-StairDownStaffAttack-alternate foot-frame2&3
4G-JumpForward1
4H-JumpForward2

5A-JumpUp1
5B-JumpUp2
5C-JumpMagic1
5D-JumpMagis2
5E-JumpStaff1
5F-JumpStaff2
5G-JumpStaff3
5H-Apex/Fall1

6A-Apex/Fall2
6B-Fall3
6C-Fall4
6D-Fall5 (Landing)
6E-ClimbUpMagicAttack1 (alternate foot)
6F-ClimbUpMagicAttack2 (alternate foot) &3
6G-ClimbDownMagicAttack1
6H-ClimbDownMagicAttack2 &3

7A-ClimbDownMagicAttack-alternate foot-1
7B-ClimbDownMagicAttack-alternate foot-2 (&3)
7C-ClimbUpStaffAttack-alternate foot-1
7D-ClimbUpStaffAttack-alternate foot-2 (&3)

...
...and here's a short animation of Sypha jumping (forward although it looks like straight up), attacking with the staff at the top of the jump, then falling and landing.

[Chernabogue]

Woaw, awesome, Jorge! We need to make a CVIII remastered for CV's 25th Anniversary xD

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

I still have my Castlevania Chronicles: Dracula's Curse C++ Code homebrew.  These sprites are too small for it though.  These are for anyone else who'd like to do a project with tiny cute sprites.

Castlevania Chronicles: Dracula's Curse Walkabout(1/2)
My old Homebrew.

Castlevania Chronicles: Dracula's Curse Walkabout(2/2)