A little while ago I tossed around the idea of making my own little Zelda-inspired game. I feel I've gotten quite a bit of experience emulating Zelda with Graal, not only with gameplay design but the core mechanics. But... Graal is very similar to Link to the Past, and I've been working with Graal for a long time... crunching the number and code to emulate LttP is the same ol' same ol' now and I tried it, it's pretty boring for me. So I decided to go a slightly different route: the Gameboy Zelda games. I do have some experience evaulating/emulating the game, as I coded a little clone in Java as a learning experience:
So a few days ago I spent a little bit of free time here and there stabbing at graphics(thankfully some of these tiles can be spat out insanely fast) and here's what I got so far:
If you're interested, I am slightly adhering to the actual GBC color restrictions, though just to ensure I capture the feeling. The main restriction I'm interested in is 4 colors per 8x8 tile. I grabbed a palette offline but there really isn't an official palette, just colors grabbed from various games(and apparently the GBC supports around 32k colors) so I use what's provided and tweak some colors here and there.
Last edited by DustyPorViva; 08-04-2012 at 06:42 AM..
Pretty happy with the outcome considering how hard it was to maintain 4 colors per tile. It definitely is a whole different type of satisfaction when you're working under such strict limitations.
Trees technically are too good for gameboy. While I adhere to the 4 tiles per tile restriction, further study shows while my work is technically feasible on the GBC, the RAM limitations would mean I wouldn't be allowed to have as many palettes as I'm using. RAM only allows 8 palettes in memory at a time(meaning only 8 sets of 4 colors on the screen for tiles). Though that's not a hardware limitation of the GBC so much as low RAM.
There's other things I'm doing that wouldn't have been possible on the GBC and all around maybe give my own graphics more appeal than the original, so I kind of give myself an upperhand they never had: I'm using much more tiles than they ever would have had available. You have to remember the storage limitations they were dealing with back them. I'm talking only a few KB's of space for the graphics of the entire game. Also They purposefully made their graphics very contrasting and bright in order to compensate for the lack of backlighting on the those older handhelds.
edit: and grass!
Last edited by DustyPorViva; 08-06-2012 at 09:08 PM..
What's above is just me tossing stuff together to see how the tiles work in functionality; it's not intended to be an actual level or overworld. However eventually these will be used for a game of mine so there will be an overworld, but none in the near future.
08-04-2012, 06:05 AM
Linear Mode
