Grayscale sprites from Dragon Quest Monsters

[NanoWar]

I love Dragon Quest Monsters as much as Dan Weiss does and thought maybe this would be nice to have for the TI in some way .

What other games/tilesets/monsters would be awesome?

There also was this other revsoft project LostLegends (example map: http://lostlegends.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Design%20Resources/maps_(calcgs)/map_arrangement_reference/castle%20grendale.png) that I thought looked fun.

So I played around with the graphics and man... there are NOT enough grayscale RPG's for the TI83!

Mockup

maptest.png (12.45 KiB) Viewed 5014 times

[chickendude]

To be honest i hate working with grayscale on the 83+. For RPGs and such i like black and white much better. On the 85/86 it looks really nice though, and the memory-mapped LCD is much less of a pain to play with than what TI gave us for the 83 series. There's a real lack of RPGs for the 83+ in general. I'm working on one and another RPG-like game, but i have too many projects and don't dedicate enough time to any of them :/

Those sprites do look nice though, if you turn them into black and white sprites i'd have lots of uses for them

[NanoWar]

Why do you hate it? Is the flickering so much? I think I only tested a few grayscale programs on my real TI83+ and that was quite horrible back then. Of course the emulator is perfect

What are you working on? Might wanna show some mock ups?

[chickendude]

The two RPG games i'm working on are GALL and Juego. I've also got two other projects that have been taking most of my time, however. One of those is Pokémon Monochrome with deeph over at yAronet:


I've been working on converting it over to an app and buffing up the text routine. It's probably a bit overkill now but now it's pretty powerful and making complicated menus and things are really easy. Currently i'm trying to fix the battle routine (rewriting routines to get rid of SMC and doing a bit of clean-up and optimization along the way). But that's a huge project...

EDIT: Forgot to answer the first part. The flicker's one part of it, it looks perfect on emulators but i've never gotten something flickerless oncalc. For some projects it looks nice, especially when everything fits on one screen (though it also will suck your batteries dry). What i really don't like is how it limits you so much, takes up so much processing power. I've kinda gotten used to having more power than i need even with our crappy LCD. Grayscale just reminds me how limited these machines really are. Making a smoothscrolling grayscale RPG for example is way beyond my abilities. And i tend to enjoy writing my own code more than borrowing other people's (for example, the grayscale libraries). I think this helps make my code a little faster since things are tuned to what i need, but a lot of times it also makes my lazy side show where i take shortcuts like byte-aligning things so i don't have to worry about bit-shifting and can use ldi/ldir to copy sprites.

[NanoWar]

Well, I DO like the 8x8 graphics you use for pokémon. It must be very hard to implement the originl game mechanics... I just had a look into the Dragon Quest Monsters mechanics (there are some guides, rom dumps etc.) and it's quite complex and I wouldn't want to rewrite it in ASM. But the tileset is great, isn't it?

Maybe I will try convert some into b/w.

[chickendude]

Thanks, deeph did most of the graphics. I just implemented a bunch of the formulas to calculate all your stats, levels, experience, etc. which was a pain but now it should at most be one off from the original, though in general the values will be exactly the same. You're right, there's a lot to factor in and i'm not sure if we've planned ahead enough, but we can always simplify things if it gets to be too much

[NanoWar]

You requested black&white sprites ...

[chickendude]

Wow, those look amazing! Do you mind if i steal some of those for Juego? Actually, i'd love to work on a game with you some day, i think the result would be really nice

[NanoWar]

Sure you can use them if you want! And yes, I'd totally like to make a collaboration game!

[chickendude]

Cool, i've sent you a PM!