#his palette can be simplified by quite a lot so it just felt fitting

[sn0wbat]

of course i had to do the hair meme with him too

[neoninu]

DRAGON BOOSTER REBOOTED // ARTHA PENN

Other Designs: Moordryd

Every few years I come back to Dragon Booster and just thrive in the deep complex lore. To me the world building was absolutely amazing and ground breaking! The characters missed the mark for me though, there’s a lot of potential that just didn’t quite hit for me. So I figured I’d make a couple of mock designs for a pretend reboot! This is what I would have done differently to improve the show! 

(disclaimer, everything is obviously my own opinion, and should be taken as such! Feel free to add in your own ideas!)

--

PERSONALITY/STORY CHANGES!

Honestly I found Artha’s personality to be kinda flat. When reading what the writers initially intended for the character, there was a lot more going on that didn’t come across in the show. 

More emphasis on emotional reactions and state.

More of a difference between regular Artha and Dragon Booster Artha

Normal Artha to be shyer and more hesitant, unsure what he can really achieve if he’s not the Dragon Booster. He’d need to learn that his power and ability to do good always came from him and not his DB abilities. But feel empowered when in his DB form, and come out of his shell!

Artha helped raise his baby brother, Lance, from a young age, (after the death of his mother early on in his life.) The writers said this is why he’s reluctant to more responsibility because he already felt overwhelmed by too much responsibility. As he was also knee high in chores looking after dragons too! I think this should be more emphasised so he doesn’t come across as bratty, highlight why he’s struggling. He’s not spoilt, he’s had a more challenging childhood. 

Allow Artha to talk about his feelings to his friends!!! His dad dies, he’s homeless, his whole life is turned upside down!!! Originally he bounces back so fast, I think it would have been way better to depict the kinda trauma this would have left on him. Have him bit by bit recover, not fully get over within one episode. 

Have Artha’s DB form be a form of escapism from all the shit going on in his life. A way to have fun and let go of the worries of Artha’s life, to just be hero that everyone loves and can do anything. (Although this slowly diminishes as he learns to stand up more as Artha, and in contrast, the weight of the true responsibility of the DB begins set in, being the DB has a LOT more responsibility than he realised and he should begin to feel less freed by becoming the DB and more weighed down that the world’s survival is actually in his hands. Maybe this could lead to panic attacks much later on, as the scale heads more in this direction, feeling unworthy. But to have his friends remind him of everything he’s achieved, as Artha, as the DB, how far he’s come and what he’s survived, remind him of how strong a person he really is. 

Have Artha value his friends way more. In the show currently he’s often dismissive to their input and doesn’t take them seriously, change this so he greatly values his friends and their ideas. Have them be more affectionate! KIDDOS NEED AFFECTION.

This also goes for Artha’s relationship with Lance, he should be way more affectionate to his little brother. Less bickering and belittling, have Artha be the big bro that Artha wished he had growing up. Artha should be supportive and doting of his brother, and super proud of everything he does. It would make Lance less annoying if all their interactions were wholesome and cute. It’s hard to like Lance if he’s treated as the annoying little brother Artha is just stuck with, and it’s just not fun to watch.

A story change but potentially have Mortis and Connor Penn not be the same guy. Have Mortis unintentionally basically adopt these lost street kiddos.THIS TROPE JUST DOESN’T WORK IF *SURPRISE* HE’S ACTUALLY BEEN BENEVOLENT PAPA PENN ALL ALONG. It literally makes no sense for Connor to hide himself from his traumatised homeless kiddos?? If he really loved his kids he wouldn’t do that??? OR ALTERNATIVELY, Connor IS just a shit neglectful father, and have that be a plot point. Rather than just be shook for a second then be a lil moody for a bit but then get over it like it’s nothing within an episode. This man straight up abandoned his kids and left them on the streets to fend for themselves. A good father wouldn’t have done that and then pretended to be someone else! Have Artha cut off toxic family. Just because you’re related by blood doesn’t mean shit. This would also be a staple for how much he’s grown up, forced to mature too early. Artha shouldn’t have to forgive his father. Some things aren’t forgivable just because you’re blood. Give Artha someone else to look up to as a father figure as found family, either another Dragon Priest (if Mortis is someone else, or just straight up a different one altogether.) Or potentially someone else entirely, like Kawake. Found family is far more meaningful because it’s /built/. Connor turning out to have been negligent also works well as a parallel to Moordryd and his shaky relationship with his father, making Artha have more in common with Moordryd.

--

MAIN DESIGN CHANGES!

At the beginning of the show Artha is caught in a house fire, his jacket was permanently damaged from it. I think it would be good to have Artha physically scarred from the fire that killed his dad! So I added burn scars! I also just think scars are cool, sue me. 

I changed his jacket to be a little more biker-esque, (as this is a racing jacket after all!) 

Sleeves were removed to simplify the design. 

His hair style was modernised as it was really very much of it’s era. Undercuts are fun and punky! 

Changed up the eye shape. I wasn’t a fan of the square eyes everyone had. Made them a little more pointed and anime. (The show’s style was supposed to be influenced by anime!)

POINTY EARS! In this world, humans live with dragons right? they have draconium in their bones, I feel like humans with pointy elf-like ears would help fit them into this magical fantasy world. In my reboot, everyone was pointy ears. It just helps give the show more of a unique flare in my opinion. (canonically Kitt’s helmet also implied pointy ears, so it’s really not a huge stretch)

-- COLOUR CHANGES!

I generally love the whacky colour schemes and bright colours and unique fashion style of the universe, although at times the designs have too much going on and clash. 

So in attempt to make Artha’s design more appealing I simplified the colour palette and removed the splash of red. 

I didn’t like how the helmet didn’t match the gold markings of his racing jacket, so I changed the colour scheme to match.

[anneedmonsonus]

A House Decorated by Marketplace – and Tips for Thrifting

Of all the bad things to come out of Facebook – the creepy harvesting of our online data, a rise in loneliness, infidelities kindled from long-lost acquaintances, the erosion of individual self-worth through unfavourable comparison, to name just a few – there are also a lot of good things. For example, I re-met my now-husband through Facebook… something I like to remind him of every so often, that lucky guy. And I’m also going to add that the fairly recent invention of Marketplace is another one of those good things to come out of Facebook.

Furniture, homewares, rugs, plants and art… these are the kinds of things being sold on Facebook Marketplace that are often super CHEAP, my friends. Often it’s sold by people who just want to be rid of it, fast, and sometimes they don’t have a true understanding of the worth of what they are offering (I remember seeing a designer-name vintage sideboard marketed as “brown cupboard”).

Another bonus is that when you buy from a person on Facebook Marketplace, you can also see if you have mutual friends in common, thus reducing your chances (hopefully) of being murdered (“Yes, he has a teardrop tattoo and he’s holding a chainsaw in his profile pic, but he’s also friends with Julie from Baskin-Robbins”). In fact Marketplace has so many good things about it that I feel jealous of people moving house or getting a new place, like my sister, because they get to furnish and style their house in the Marketplace era. Like, I remember moving to this house, and looking at ads for secondhand dining tables after going to the newsagent and buying The QUOKKA. Yes, a physical copy of a classifieds ad newspaper, with tiny, succinctly written ads and no pictures, woaaah. Furnishing a home now that there is Marketplace is kind of like getting married but before there was Pinterest and after there was Pinterest, but better than that. I say this after spending pretty much TWO DAYS of my life making little white and milk chocolate milk balls with carefully affixed, painstakingly handmade customised chocolate wax seals for bonbonnieres, simply because I had seen a picture of them on Pinterest and I HAD TO RECREATE THEM, and I don’t think a single person at my wedding appreciated the sheer effort that had gone into these chocolate wax seal balls except my best friend from high school who had flown in for our wedding from London, saw the different-coloured chocolate balls and shrieked, “Does no-one notice that these chocolates have RACIAL CONNOTATIONS.” (This is why we are friends).

Anyway, many of my friends share my Marketplace and thrifting love – but I don’t know anyone more enthusiastic about it than my friend Nelly Reffet of Twinkle and Whistle Interior Design. (In fact, we put together this post on our fave Marketplace finds a while back). Recently Nelly shared photos of this Perth house with me – one I instantly dubbed The Marketplace House, because she and the owners styled it to sell using a LOT of thrifted Marketplace finds. And look how inviting it looks!

RUG LOVING: The rug in the living area is a beautiful Persian-like wool rug, 3m x 2m. “It’s super plush and soft, in pristine condition and it cost $250 – normally it would retail in the thousands,” says Nelly. “It took forever to get though, as the seller was difficult to reach and spoke little English. But it made the purchase almost… exotic!”

Nelly met owners Mark and Jasmin back in 2009, when they first asked Nelly for design help. Mark and Jasmin had recently bought their first home together, an ’80s house in East Cannington in need of a revamp. “Even back in those days, I loved their appetite for non-beigey interiors, and the low budget considerations made me tap into some small but efficient creative tricks to make their house shine without blowing the budget,” says Nelly.

After a full reno and a fair bit of styling, Mark and Jasmin enjoyed many years of happy memories in their sweet light-filled home. However the desire to live closer to the ocean, so the kids (and the dogs!) could roam free on sandy beaches and everyone could enjoy cooler summers, led them to move out of their first home a few years ago.

Nelly’s daughter playing with Mark and Jasmin’s kids, now her friends.

“What was their sanctuary became a rental property, and with that came a few years of sometimes neglectful tenants and inevitable house mishaps,” says Nelly. “In order to simplify their life, Jasmin and Mark decided recently it was time to sell their beloved first home, but unfortunately, the property was not quite ready for it. A fair bit of work was required before the property could be advertised, and with a pretty gloomy-looking market in Perth, they decided to furnish and style the property to maximise its overall attractiveness.”

That was when Mark and Jasmin called Nelly to the rescue again. With a budget worn thin by essential maintenance and repair work, they could not quite invest in buying or hiring new furniture. “Instead, we decided to go in full shoestring mode and source pre-loved furniture and homeware to make their house shine again,” says Nelly. “With the exception of most linen pieces, which were purchased in store, and of some of the decorative items, which are from Mark and Jasmin’s personal collection, almost everything was gathered through Facebook Marketplace, and occasionally from the verge.”

I know some people will ask, why bother furnishing and styling the home at all? – and it’s not an unreasonable question. Well, home styling, or staging, as it’s called for the real estate market, is about presenting a home to its best – showing people how a house can be lived in; and trying to get them to form an emotional attachment to a home, ideally leading to a sale. Staged homes tend to sell faster (frequently in half the average time) – and for an estimated 7 to 12 percent more than unstyled homes, so the financial benefits can be worth the work and monetary investment put into the styling. And contrary to popular notion, good home staging doesn’t have to be expensive, or just for high-end homes – which is why Perth has seen a big boom in the past ten years in property staging businesses as well as interior designers that offer staging as a service.

Nelly says Jasmin and Mark wanted their house to stand out from an already saturated property market, and colour was one of the ways to go.

“In a very competitive market, we didn’t want another grey-on-grey-on-pastel-colours house,” she says.

“We wanted a place that would be warm and personal enough to feel like a home, but not too individual, as so not to be too personal.

“Many blogs out there and real estate agents too will advise you to remove all personal belongings and to go as neutral as possible to appeal to a wider audience. I beg to disagree with that, at least partially. If you keep a mostly neutral palette on your walls and floors (so potential buyers don’t have to do any work when they move in), you can still have a little bit of fun when styling by using bright or bolder removable items, such as soft furnishings and art.” And the scouring of Marketplace began, to give this modest yet pretty home a facelift.

LIVING ROOM: The yellow sofa and its matching ottoman were $250. “These were the first pieces we bought, and they became the driving factor for the living room design,” says Nelly. “The colour was a bold choice, but the shape is not bulky so the colour doesn’t overpower the room. All other pieces were picked with that yellow couch in mind, i.e. we wanted them to tone it down and let it shine at the same time: we didn’t want strong contrasting colours or too much harsh black or white. The neutrals soften it up, while the rug – because of its texture but also style and colour, grounds the room.”

NEW BED: “The upholstered queen bed in the master bedroom was totally brand new and sold at $250!” says Nelly.

Using Marketplace to style a house often means you need to allow a bit more time to put together than a traditional styling job would, says Nelly. “As you rely on what people put up for sale, it’s not as easy as driving to a showroom and helping yourself to what you like. You have to be patient to find the right piece, quick to contact the seller, and willing, sometimes, to travel a fair distance to collect your goods. You also don’t quite know the actual condition of the item until you see it, unless there are plenty of photos.”

Each item was carefully selected so it would fit the space well, both from a layout and a style perspective. As things tend to sell quickly on Marketplace, it was sometimes frustrating to miss out on a ‘perfect’ item. “But with the high turnover of the platform, we found alternatives within days, and sometimes hours,” says Nelly.

So is it all worth the effort and the risk? Mark and Jasmin felt the cost of the styling to be worth it. “They ended up spending just under $2,000 for styling their three bedroom house – a fraction of the cost of what new furniture would have been,” says Nelly. “Their biggest (unexpected) splurge was a $150 throw bought at Adairs, which was incorrectly placed on a “Sale” shelf… they only found that out at the time of paying, and by then, they liked the throw too much to put it back!” The house sold for $20k over the agent’s initial expectations, after only eight weeks on the market – which Mark and Jasmin considered a win in their suburb and in the current market.

At this point you might be thinking, ‘Ok, so they bought a lot of furniture and then what? They sell the house and they’re stuck with a bunch of stuff they don’t need?’ Two things. One, Mark and Jasmin bought things that they either hoped to use in their new home, or that they could easily re-sell, if required.

Their biggest win: a beautifully soft and plush large Persian rug in as new condition bought from Marketplace for $250. “It would retail at around $1000 at least new in-store,” says Nelly. “Jasmin is looking forward for the house to sell, so she can bring the rug to their home pronto.

“That is one of the advantages of buying second-hand items instead of hiring furniture: the items belong to you! You are free to do what you want with them once the house has sold: sell them again or bring them home.

“Similarly, if the house doesn’t sell in the expected timeframe, you don’t need to extend a hiring contract and incur additional expenses either. It’s maximum flexibility at a limited cost.”

MORE MARKETPLACE: The grey couch was only $180, and was from just around the corner.

BEFORE. The dining room got a small facelift with a light change.

AFTER

So, if you are thinking of selling your house soon – or even if you just want to revamp your home a little – don’t hesitate to explore Marketplace instead of hitting the shops, advises Nelly. “It can be a fun and rewarding ‘hunting and gathering’ experience, it treads lightly on our planet’s resources, you can find some unique pieces, and save some significant cash in the process. What’s not to love about that?” Maya x

NELLY’S TIPS FOR MARKETPLACE SUCCESS

1. Be reactive. If you see something you like, initiate contact with the seller fast! You can still sort out the logistics a little later. Great scores get snapped up very quickly on Marketplace so the faster you react, the more chances you have to secure the deal. Special brownie points if you offer to pick up immediately or on the day.

2. Be polite and personal. To make the buying process easier, Facebook has come up with default questions and messages you can send the sellers as a first contact. If you’re really keen on something, try not to use them. Even when communication is digital, being polite and addressing people personally often goes a long way. That doesn’t mean you have to tell your life story though, but starting your message with “Hi” and using the seller’s name may make you stand out in a sea of “Is it available?”

3. Read the ad in full. As a seller, it is infuriating to receive messages like “where are you located?” when the Marketplace ad clearly says so. Do you have time to answer questions that have already been addressed? I don’t. Most people don’t. Some ads are pretty short (or quasi-inexistent) and others more descriptive. The least you can do if you see an item you like is to read the ad in full and only ask questions that are essential and not already covered. Common sense, huh? But you’d be surprised how many people don’t go past the photo and headline!

4. Don’t mess with collection. Once again, speed is key on Marketplace. I do not encourage you to go beyond speed limits on the freeway to pick up your bargain, but you don’t want to mess around with collection. Ask the seller when it’s best for them or suggest a day and time, and stick to what’s agreed. If you don’t have a suitable car and struggle to ask a friend for their trailer or ute, hiring one is often inexpensive and fast. Or you could hire an Airtasker or other individuals who hustle as delivery drivers to do the heavy lifting for you.

5. Be open-minded and patient. The more specific you are, the more narrow your pool will be. So identify your essential criteria (for furniture, measurements are crucial!), and keep some flexibility for the rest, being brand or style, colours or materials.

6. Be patient! The beauty of Marketplace is that it is a big cycle that moves fast. People buy and sell all the time. You just have to be there when opportunity knocks at your digital door.

7. Be safe. Give someone the details of where you are going and when, and ideally bring a friend or your partner to do pick up with you if you’re feeling unsure, especially at night.

You can follow Nelly’s thrifting adventures on Instagram @nelly_reffet or visit her site at Twinkle and Whistle.

The post A House Decorated by Marketplace – and Tips for Thrifting appeared first on House Nerd.

from Home Improvement https://house-nerd.com/2020/01/23/the-marketplace-house/

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Shovel Knight is a game that embraces the look of NES classics, but has some major differences when examined closely. When setting out to develop the game's aesthetic and play style, we at Yacht Club Games had a few goals in mind. Instead of emulating the NES exactly, we would create a rose-tinted view of an 8-bit game.

What if development for the NES never stopped? How would an 8-bit game feel and play if developed today? We imagined the gameplay would benefit from modern design lessons, and the tech would receive subtle but substantial upgrades. This was possible to an extent on the NES, where technology was built into the cartridges.

Later NES games like Super Mario Bros. 3 packed cartridge tech that was vastly improved from early NES titles like the original Super Mario Bros. Different chipsets allowed for features like diagonal scrolling, larger sprites, or (unique to the Japanese Famicom, as detailed below) additional sound channels. Compounded with improved techniques and understanding of the hardware, the difference between early and late-life NES games can be staggering.

                We imagined that perhaps some cartridge advancements would allow for the techniques displayed in Shovel Knight. We also broke some NES limitations purely out of preference... we decided to eliminate any drawback that would hamstring the gameplay experience.  One example is sprite flickering, which occurred when the NES tried to display more than 8 sprites per horizontal line. This effect is nostalgic for some, but we felt it was detrimental, so we nixed it. However, we did make gameplay design decisions based on the idea of sprite flickering: we tried to avoid cluttering the screen with onscreen objects, and limited things like particle effects.  Being aware of the rules in this case led to the game feeling clear and simple; one of the hallmarks of a great NES game.

There are many more examples, so let’s go into more detail on how we bent the rules of the NES!

Modern Hardware! Console and PC Versions!  We aren’t on the NES!

Shovel Knight runs natively on modern hardware, and cannot run on NES hardware. This surprised some people who took our NES intentions quite literally, with some players hoping to play Shovel Knight on a homebrew NES flash cartridge.

The truth is that Shovel Knight is quite a complex game, capable of running on many hardware platforms and configurations. On the current-gen Nintendo platforms, Shovel Knight supports some unique wireless and internet features using Nintendo's Miiverse and Streetpass functionality. Third party middleware like FMOD audio and SDL controller support were also integrated.

Widescreen 16:9 display (or 5:3 on the 3DS)

Part of our modern upgrade was extending the viewable screen space, avoiding the black bars you would see in an NES virtual console game.  This meant displaying our game at the 16:9 resolution native to most modern displays.  While we did change our aspect resolution, we didn’t change the resolution in terms of making Shovel Knight a pixel-dense HD game.

Instead, each Shovel Knight pixel is really 4.5x4.5 pixels at 1080p, giving a virtual resolution of 400×240. An NES outputs at 256×240, giving us the same viewable vertical resolution. Our background tiles (like most NES games) are 16×16 in size, and we have the same number of vertical tiles as an NES game. Keeping the vertical and tile size dimensions were important to us in order to match the gameplay feel of NES titles. The only difference is additional horizontal space, which we thought was a great addition, allowing extra room in level design for puzzles, objects, and breathing room.

Background parallax

Background parallax scrolling is the ability to shift different layers or parts of the screen at different rates, giving 2D layers the appearance of 3D movement. Imagine watching out the side window of the car on a highway: the mountains far away don't appear to move at all, while the posts whiz by very quickly.  The beginning of our first trailer gives a taste of the effect. This advanced effect is much more typical of the SNES. It was possible on the NES, but only with a lot of trickery.  Programmers had a couple of options: 

Early on with Shovel Knight, we decided to amp up the parallax scrolling, creating an average of 5-6 layers of backgrounds to scroll by. This felt like the next technological step the NES would make so it didn't feel out of place to us.  More importantly, adding the effect made the gameplay layer more readable. There was another great benefit to having so many layers: we could really take advantage of the 3DS’ eye-popping stereoscopic effects!

Sprite Flickering

Sprite flickering on the NES would occur when more than 8 sprites were displayed on the same horizontal line.  We kept the sprite count as low as we could, but as previously mentioned, we didn't sweat the exact numbers. Some of our objects produce a few more particles than an NES game would dare��� but we thought it was worth the beauty.

Some games like Recca or Contra got around sprite limits by displaying certain sprites only every other frame (at 30fps instead of 60fps). On CRT monitors running low resolution interlaced video, objects would appear to be drawn every frame. In addition to this, NES particle art was often built with flickering in mind for effects like explosions. We used flashing sprites in some situations to replace alpha transparency; For example, Shovel Knight flashes on and off during his "invincible" state, after being hit. So overall, this didn't feel like an important restriction to follow, unless it made the gameplay not feel like NES gameplay.

Color Palette Additions

The NES was only capable of spitting out 54 different colors... and that's not a lot. The problem for us mainly came in trying to display a gradient in most hues. For example, there isn’t a very useful yellow, the darker spectrum of color is very underrepresented, and there aren’t many shades that work for displaying a character with a darker skin tone. Sticking to the NES palette was a big priority for us, though, as it gives a very distinctive look. In the end, we ended up with only a few extra colors.

For more info on NES colors, check out this wiki: http://ift.tt/1lVWEuV

The dark purple here is #22123B

So what are the colors of our shame? In this shot from Treasure Knight’s stage, you can see the dark purple details in the ground. Once added, this purple was used elsewhere, mainly as a bridge between black and the cooler colors of any given background.

The deep red hue is #360900

Similarly to the purple, we needed a color to bridge the gap from black to our warmer colors. This dark red shows up prominently in Mole Knight’s stage, The Lost City. You won’t see this red as commonly used as the purple, because the NES palette leans heavily toward cool colors. Famously, Mega Man was conceived of as a red robot, but was changed to blue after the developers saw the spectrum.

The beige cloak is #9E9E5C

This next cheater color was actually the first created. We needed a color for the sheepskin cloak that Polar Knight wears and none of the colors in the NES palette really fit the bill. This beige is also used for his skin and to keep things in theming with the rest of the level. We actually intended to go back and fix this beige since it is the only place in the whole game that it’s used, but nothing we tried ever worked. In the end we just decided to leave it.

This villager sports: #824e00

The final cheater color was needed to help make the cast of Shovel Knight more diverse. The default NES color palette provides very few tools to create a character with darker skin tones. This was especially problematic when doing the “Pixel My Face” Kickstarter rewards (at a certain pledge tier, backers are immortalized as portraits in the game) since we had backers from all corners of the earth. So our final cheater color is the light brown that gives shade to this fellow's face!

Number of Colors Per Sprite

Sprites on the NES were limited to 4 colors (or 3 colors + transparency) as you can see with the sprite characters in The Legend of Zelda screenshot on the right.

Some developers created more colorful sprites using another trick. Characters like Mega Man were constructed out of two sprites, one for his body (blue, light blue, and black) and one for his face (beige, white, and black), and the sprites were overlaid. This is why Mega Man’s face will flicker separately from his body sometimes. For Shovel Knight, we decided to treat most sprites like Mega Man, and give them 4-5 colors to work with in addition to transparency.

Getting this balance right was a tricky process, as a character with too many colors stuck out like a sore thumb. We worked back and forth with detail levels and colors until we found a combo that looked great.

A sprite too detailed is also really hard to animate!

  In this example, you can see the original King Knight design. While the left sprite has only 5 colors (as was our stated limitation), it was too detailed and almost felt closer to a 16 bit sprite. After taking a few passes to simplify the shapes for readability and simplicity, we ended up with the sprite that you see in game!

Multiple Color Palettes Simultaneously

Although every sprite in Shovel Knight is created using limited colors, we didn't make all sprites onscreen abide by a single color palette.  To cite Mega Man again as an example, the player's sprite color changes also affect 1-Ups and other items. This is due to a uniform color palette; when a color is adjusted for one sprite, all sprites change color. We chose to not worry about this limitation as the headache to make one palette work doesn't benefit gameplay, but we did use limited color palettes to create enemy variants and for cycling damage and explosion effects.

Those effects made gameplay more clear and exciting; for example, cycling damage made it obvious you were hurting an enemy as the effect was consistent across all objects and added fun as the color cycling was more impactful than your typical 'gethit' animation or flickering. These palette cycling and shifting effects were created by passing an indexed unsigned byte texture representing the sprite and a full 32 bit color texture representing the palette to a pixel shader...quite the leap from 8-bit technology to imitate the good old days!

To see the limits of palette effects, check out this site, which shows the amazing animations you can create by cycling a single color palette.

Memory Limitations

An NES cart could only hold so much information: code, animations, backgrounds, text, music, and everything else had to fit into 32k of memory, although this was expanded greatly through the use of on-cartridge chips called memory mappers, which became essential as more advanced graphics and special effects required ROM sizes as large as 4-6 megabits (0.5 ~ 0.75 MB). Shovel Knight weighs in at almost 1.2 gigabits (about 150 MB - most of which is .mp3s). Because we didn't have to fit onto a small cartridge, the extreme optimization and data compression required for that wasn't necessary, and we were able to focus our technical efforts on gameplay systems and stability.

Our composer and sound designer Jake 'Virt' Kaufman likes to remind us that the soundtrack, when compiled into authentic machine code (see below) will fit nicely into the 6 megabit Kirby's Adventure cartridge, but only if all graphics and gameplay code are removed first.

Big Sprites

The sprite hardware on the NES was not optimal for drawing very large moving objects, due to the limitations it imposed (after all, even a few small ones could cause flickering).  To get around this limitation, clever developers displayed big art as animated background tile layers.  That is the reason why, whenever you fight a large enemy on the NES, they are usually on a black screen with no background art. The boss is the background.

We thought that the black background with the huge boss always gave NES games a distinctive and epic feel, where the focus was just on you and your enemy, so we decided it was important to keep. However, lacking sprite limitations, we didn't need to mess with background layers or other workarounds to make a large sprite possible.  We simply used our animated sprite code, were careful with the designs, and made sure the sprite was on a black (or very dark) background.

Camera shakes

Shaking the camera to show a powerful rumble is a time-honored videogame effect. On the NES, camera shakes only occurred on a single axis. Pay attention next time you see Bowser smashing the ground in the final encounter in Super Mario Bros 3 . This has to do with the NES’s difficulties doing diagonal scrolling.  And this is something we broke, because we didn’t find a compelling reason to keep it.

HUD as a Layer

One oddity of NES games is that sprites usually draw in front of the HUD. On the NES, most HUDs were drawn on the background layer. This is because there was only 1 layer, so the background and HUD had to share. In many cases, the memory mapper chips that enabled large ROM sizes also contained special timing hardware to support "split screen" status bars, but the background layer was still just a background, and sprites were drawn over it. So, if the player was able to reach the top of the screen, the HUD would be covered up by their sprite. Occasionally, this behavior was used as a gameplay mechanic, as secrets or paths could be hidden in such "unreachable" screen space. We love this quirk, and stuck to it as best we could, but sometimes the layering got too weird, and we had to change a few instances on a case by case basis.

Sound Limitations

The music is probably the most authentically NES part of Shovel Knight, although it might seem more lush and full than you'd expect for a NES game. That’s because it is written to use a special memory mapper / sound chip called the VRC6, which was used in several Konami games toward the end of the NES era. This chip allows for advanced graphical techniques, but most famously adds 3 additional sound channels, giving the music much more richness and depth. However, external sound chips such as the VRC6 only worked on the Japanese Famicom, as the Western NES lacked the necessary cartridge connections, so it's an unfamiliar sound to most western gamers. Compare the music in the US version of Castlevania III with the Japanese release, Akumajou Densetsu; the difference is striking.

  Composer Jake Kaufman went about creating Shovel Knight’s music and sound effects using a freely available program called Famitracker. Famitracker exports music in NES machine code, which is capable of running on an actual NES or Famicom console, with all of its limitations and hardware quirks. We finalized the audio using mastering tools (EQ and compression) to give it some extra punch on today’s sound equipment, but avoided using reverb effects or stereo mixing, which would destroy the raw character of the sounds. Any echoes or special effects you hear are programmed note-by-note, the way they were on the NES.  Here's a video of Jake demoing the complexities of a couple tracks created in Famitracker for Shovel Knight.

Another limitation of the NES was that sound effects would often cause one of the audio channels to drop out.  The NES shared the same 5 basic channels for both music and sounds, so the SFX would temporarily steal one or more of the music channels in order to be played. This effect is not present in Shovel Knight - the sound effects are simply layered on top of the music, which is completely inauthentic, but much nicer to listen to.

The next time you boot up an NES game, though, listen closely and notice how most games will drop out the bass, drums, or harmony to the melody in order to pack in more sound effects.

When you add up all the changes, it seems like there is a vast gulf between Shovel Knight and the technology of the NES. However, we feel that the core of the aesthetics of the 8-bit era has been respected, and perhaps even enhanced!

Shovel Knight was a dream project, allowing us to explore a style of game that's rarely seen today. It was fascinating to try and problem-solve the technical issues of yesteryear while avoiding any pitfalls that would belie real modernity. We hope that by being true to the NES in more than just superficial ways, we've built fanciful rock-solid fundamentals. 

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Shovel Knight is a game that embraces the look of NES classics, but has some major differences when examined closely. When setting out to develop the game's aesthetic and play style, we at Yacht Club Games had a few goals in mind. Instead of emulating the NES exactly, we would create a rose-tinted view of an 8-bit game.

What if development for the NES never stopped? How would an 8-bit game feel and play if developed today? We imagined the gameplay would benefit from modern design lessons, and the tech would receive subtle but substantial upgrades. This was possible to an extent on the NES, where technology was built into the cartridges.

Later NES games like Super Mario Bros. 3 packed cartridge tech that was vastly improved from early NES titles like the original Super Mario Bros. Different chipsets allowed for features like diagonal scrolling, larger sprites, or (unique to the Japanese Famicom, as detailed below) additional sound channels. Compounded with improved techniques and understanding of the hardware, the difference between early and late-life NES games can be staggering.

                We imagined that perhaps some cartridge advancements would allow for the techniques displayed in Shovel Knight. We also broke some NES limitations purely out of preference... we decided to eliminate any drawback that would hamstring the gameplay experience.  One example is sprite flickering, which occurred when the NES tried to display more than 8 sprites per horizontal line. This effect is nostalgic for some, but we felt it was detrimental, so we nixed it. However, we did make gameplay design decisions based on the idea of sprite flickering: we tried to avoid cluttering the screen with onscreen objects, and limited things like particle effects.  Being aware of the rules in this case led to the game feeling clear and simple; one of the hallmarks of a great NES game.

There are many more examples, so let’s go into more detail on how we bent the rules of the NES!

Modern Hardware! Console and PC Versions!  We aren’t on the NES!

Shovel Knight runs natively on modern hardware, and cannot run on NES hardware. This surprised some people who took our NES intentions quite literally, with some players hoping to play Shovel Knight on a homebrew NES flash cartridge.

The truth is that Shovel Knight is quite a complex game, capable of running on many hardware platforms and configurations. On the current-gen Nintendo platforms, Shovel Knight supports some unique wireless and internet features using Nintendo's Miiverse and Streetpass functionality. Third party middleware like FMOD audio and SDL controller support were also integrated.

Widescreen 16:9 display (or 5:3 on the 3DS)

Part of our modern upgrade was extending the viewable screen space, avoiding the black bars you would see in an NES virtual console game.  This meant displaying our game at the 16:9 resolution native to most modern displays.  While we did change our aspect resolution, we didn’t change the resolution in terms of making Shovel Knight a pixel-dense HD game.

Instead, each Shovel Knight pixel is really 4.5x4.5 pixels at 1080p, giving a virtual resolution of 400×240. An NES outputs at 256×240, giving us the same viewable vertical resolution. Our background tiles (like most NES games) are 16×16 in size, and we have the same number of vertical tiles as an NES game. Keeping the vertical and tile size dimensions were important to us in order to match the gameplay feel of NES titles. The only difference is additional horizontal space, which we thought was a great addition, allowing extra room in level design for puzzles, objects, and breathing room.

Background parallax

Background parallax scrolling is the ability to shift different layers or parts of the screen at different rates, giving 2D layers the appearance of 3D movement. Imagine watching out the side window of the car on a highway: the mountains far away don't appear to move at all, while the posts whiz by very quickly.  The beginning of our first trailer gives a taste of the effect. This advanced effect is much more typical of the SNES. It was possible on the NES, but only with a lot of trickery.  Programmers had a couple of options: 

Early on with Shovel Knight, we decided to amp up the parallax scrolling, creating an average of 5-6 layers of backgrounds to scroll by. This felt like the next technological step the NES would make so it didn't feel out of place to us.  More importantly, adding the effect made the gameplay layer more readable. There was another great benefit to having so many layers: we could really take advantage of the 3DS’ eye-popping stereoscopic effects!

Sprite Flickering

Sprite flickering on the NES would occur when more than 8 sprites were displayed on the same horizontal line.  We kept the sprite count as low as we could, but as previously mentioned, we didn't sweat the exact numbers. Some of our objects produce a few more particles than an NES game would dare… but we thought it was worth the beauty.

Some games like Recca or Contra got around sprite limits by displaying certain sprites only every other frame (at 30fps instead of 60fps). On CRT monitors running low resolution interlaced video, objects would appear to be drawn every frame. In addition to this, NES particle art was often built with flickering in mind for effects like explosions. We used flashing sprites in some situations to replace alpha transparency; For example, Shovel Knight flashes on and off during his "invincible" state, after being hit. So overall, this didn't feel like an important restriction to follow, unless it made the gameplay not feel like NES gameplay.

Color Palette Additions

The NES was only capable of spitting out 54 different colors... and that's not a lot. The problem for us mainly came in trying to display a gradient in most hues. For example, there isn’t a very useful yellow, the darker spectrum of color is very underrepresented, and there aren’t many shades that work for displaying a character with a darker skin tone. Sticking to the NES palette was a big priority for us, though, as it gives a very distinctive look. In the end, we ended up with only a few extra colors.

For more info on NES colors, check out this wiki: http://ift.tt/1lVWEuV

The dark purple here is #22123B

So what are the colors of our shame? In this shot from Treasure Knight’s stage, you can see the dark purple details in the ground. Once added, this purple was used elsewhere, mainly as a bridge between black and the cooler colors of any given background.

The deep red hue is #360900

Similarly to the purple, we needed a color to bridge the gap from black to our warmer colors. This dark red shows up prominently in Mole Knight’s stage, The Lost City. You won’t see this red as commonly used as the purple, because the NES palette leans heavily toward cool colors. Famously, Mega Man was conceived of as a red robot, but was changed to blue after the developers saw the spectrum.

The beige cloak is #9E9E5C

This next cheater color was actually the first created. We needed a color for the sheepskin cloak that Polar Knight wears and none of the colors in the NES palette really fit the bill. This beige is also used for his skin and to keep things in theming with the rest of the level. We actually intended to go back and fix this beige since it is the only place in the whole game that it’s used, but nothing we tried ever worked. In the end we just decided to leave it.

This villager sports: #824e00

The final cheater color was needed to help make the cast of Shovel Knight more diverse. The default NES color palette provides very few tools to create a character with darker skin tones. This was especially problematic when doing the “Pixel My Face” Kickstarter rewards (at a certain pledge tier, backers are immortalized as portraits in the game) since we had backers from all corners of the earth. So our final cheater color is the light brown that gives shade to this fellow's face!

Number of Colors Per Sprite

Sprites on the NES were limited to 4 colors (or 3 colors + transparency) as you can see with the sprite characters in The Legend of Zelda screenshot on the right.

Some developers created more colorful sprites using another trick. Characters like Mega Man were constructed out of two sprites, one for his body (blue, light blue, and black) and one for his face (beige, white, and black), and the sprites were overlaid. This is why Mega Man’s face will flicker separately from his body sometimes. For Shovel Knight, we decided to treat most sprites like Mega Man, and give them 4-5 colors to work with in addition to transparency.

Getting this balance right was a tricky process, as a character with too many colors stuck out like a sore thumb. We worked back and forth with detail levels and colors until we found a combo that looked great.

A sprite too detailed is also really hard to animate!

  In this example, you can see the original King Knight design. While the left sprite has only 5 colors (as was our stated limitation), it was too detailed and almost felt closer to a 16 bit sprite. After taking a few passes to simplify the shapes for readability and simplicity, we ended up with the sprite that you see in game!

Multiple Color Palettes Simultaneously

Although every sprite in Shovel Knight is created using limited colors, we didn't make all sprites onscreen abide by a single color palette.  To cite Mega Man again as an example, the player's sprite color changes also affect 1-Ups and other items. This is due to a uniform color palette; when a color is adjusted for one sprite, all sprites change color. We chose to not worry about this limitation as the headache to make one palette work doesn't benefit gameplay, but we did use limited color palettes to create enemy variants and for cycling damage and explosion effects.

Those effects made gameplay more clear and exciting; for example, cycling damage made it obvious you were hurting an enemy as the effect was consistent across all objects and added fun as the color cycling was more impactful than your typical 'gethit' animation or flickering. These palette cycling and shifting effects were created by passing an indexed unsigned byte texture representing the sprite and a full 32 bit color texture representing the palette to a pixel shader...quite the leap from 8-bit technology to imitate the good old days!

To see the limits of palette effects, check out this site, which shows the amazing animations you can create by cycling a single color palette.

Memory Limitations

An NES cart could only hold so much information: code, animations, backgrounds, text, music, and everything else had to fit into 32k of memory, although this was expanded greatly through the use of on-cartridge chips called memory mappers, which became essential as more advanced graphics and special effects required ROM sizes as large as 4-6 megabits (0.5 ~ 0.75 MB). Shovel Knight weighs in at almost 1.2 gigabits (about 150 MB - most of which is .mp3s). Because we didn't have to fit onto a small cartridge, the extreme optimization and data compression required for that wasn't necessary, and we were able to focus our technical efforts on gameplay systems and stability.

Our composer and sound designer Jake 'Virt' Kaufman likes to remind us that the soundtrack, when compiled into authentic machine code (see below) will fit nicely into the 6 megabit Kirby's Adventure cartridge, but only if all graphics and gameplay code are removed first.

Big Sprites

The sprite hardware on the NES was not optimal for drawing very large moving objects, due to the limitations it imposed (after all, even a few small ones could cause flickering).  To get around this limitation, clever developers displayed big art as animated background tile layers.  That is the reason why, whenever you fight a large enemy on the NES, they are usually on a black screen with no background art. The boss is the background.

We thought that the black background with the huge boss always gave NES games a distinctive and epic feel, where the focus was just on you and your enemy, so we decided it was important to keep. However, lacking sprite limitations, we didn't need to mess with background layers or other workarounds to make a large sprite possible.  We simply used our animated sprite code, were careful with the designs, and made sure the sprite was on a black (or very dark) background.

Camera shakes

Shaking the camera to show a powerful rumble is a time-honored videogame effect. On the NES, camera shakes only occurred on a single axis. Pay attention next time you see Bowser smashing the ground in the final encounter in Super Mario Bros 3 . This has to do with the NES’s difficulties doing diagonal scrolling.  And this is something we broke, because we didn’t find a compelling reason to keep it.

HUD as a Layer

One oddity of NES games is that sprites usually draw in front of the HUD. On the NES, most HUDs were drawn on the background layer. This is because there was only 1 layer, so the background and HUD had to share. In many cases, the memory mapper chips that enabled large ROM sizes also contained special timing hardware to support "split screen" status bars, but the background layer was still just a background, and sprites were drawn over it. So, if the player was able to reach the top of the screen, the HUD would be covered up by their sprite. Occasionally, this behavior was used as a gameplay mechanic, as secrets or paths could be hidden in such "unreachable" screen space. We love this quirk, and stuck to it as best we could, but sometimes the layering got too weird, and we had to change a few instances on a case by case basis.

Sound Limitations

The music is probably the most authentically NES part of Shovel Knight, although it might seem more lush and full than you'd expect for a NES game. That’s because it is written to use a special memory mapper / sound chip called the VRC6, which was used in several Konami games toward the end of the NES era. This chip allows for advanced graphical techniques, but most famously adds 3 additional sound channels, giving the music much more richness and depth. However, external sound chips such as the VRC6 only worked on the Japanese Famicom, as the Western NES lacked the necessary cartridge connections, so it's an unfamiliar sound to most western gamers. Compare the music in the US version of Castlevania III with the Japanese release, Akumajou Densetsu; the difference is striking.

  Composer Jake Kaufman went about creating Shovel Knight’s music and sound effects using a freely available program called Famitracker. Famitracker exports music in NES machine code, which is capable of running on an actual NES or Famicom console, with all of its limitations and hardware quirks. We finalized the audio using mastering tools (EQ and compression) to give it some extra punch on today’s sound equipment, but avoided using reverb effects or stereo mixing, which would destroy the raw character of the sounds. Any echoes or special effects you hear are programmed note-by-note, the way they were on the NES.  Here's a video of Jake demoing the complexities of a couple tracks created in Famitracker for Shovel Knight.

Another limitation of the NES was that sound effects would often cause one of the audio channels to drop out.  The NES shared the same 5 basic channels for both music and sounds, so the SFX would temporarily steal one or more of the music channels in order to be played. This effect is not present in Shovel Knight - the sound effects are simply layered on top of the music, which is completely inauthentic, but much nicer to listen to.

The next time you boot up an NES game, though, listen closely and notice how most games will drop out the bass, drums, or harmony to the melody in order to pack in more sound effects.

When you add up all the changes, it seems like there is a vast gulf between Shovel Knight and the technology of the NES. However, we feel that the core of the aesthetics of the 8-bit era has been respected, and perhaps even enhanced!

Shovel Knight was a dream project, allowing us to explore a style of game that's rarely seen today. It was fascinating to try and problem-solve the technical issues of yesteryear while avoiding any pitfalls that would belie real modernity. We hope that by being true to the NES in more than just superficial ways, we've built fanciful rock-solid fundamentals.