16 Colour Shmuppery

Detour: There's a 1987 arcade game by Taito/Toaplan called Flying Shark that I looked into recently for no particular reason. It has a few ports for other systems, including the Amiga. Often Amiga games were actually limited by the Atari ST specs as developers apparently wanted to publish on both systems.

The Flying Shark port features redrawn graphics and a new palette rather then the original richer arcade graphics. The palette they chose is quite garish, which is fine for readability but when you try to cover all of the primary/secondary colours then there is no indices left for ramps, so even though you have 16 colours, you can only use a few per object. 

Another approach (which was often seen on the Amiga) is having longer desaturated ramps, then you are more likely to find a value (brightness) which fits, and if the hue is a bit off it doesn't matter too much. Sometimes it livens up the gradients. Also, you can let the hues dictate the design a bit. If the colour is a bit green, that's an opportunity to suggest a piece of moss right there.

http://androidarts.com/Amiga/Skyshark.png 

Anyways, you may have seen my two Flying Shark posted on twitter. Flying Shark uses 16 local colours per tile or sprite, resulting in well over 256 colours on screen. I attempted to truncate that into 16 globally for the background (and probably enemies), with the player&bullets sprite using a separate sprite palette. Some of the colours are quite close in value, but I found that for larger terrain areas subtle hues matter.  

http://androidarts.com/Amiga/SharkHill.png 

Here the palette dictates the detailing.

I also wrote a dumper for the Flying Shark graphics, but started to wonder what I was doing with my time. 

Long story short, I instead decided to make my own shmup assets, using the palette, so here they are. It's not the kind of palette I'd design for enemy sprites, but I wanted to see what could be done with it. It's kinda neat to work with longer ramps. I've kept the silhouettes to show that part of the process. 

I also have some thoughts on what I'd do game design-wise. I always like how in Dogs of War on the Amiga you could play the missions in any order but the harder ones were tough without having earned money completing the easier ones.  There are shmups with shops, but those are often linear so it feels kind of moot to upgrade to the expected difficulty. The second thing I'd go for is... player adaptation. In some games you get maxed out and strafe about making enemies poof at the edge of the screen while you dodge random bullets. I think just something like the laser, spread, missiles etc. instantly available on buttons would give me more to do while playing. There's a column - laser right through it. Some enemies in from the side - spread gun. Incoming weak bullet cluster - erase with short range pulse shot.

Might add a few more sprites tomorrow. Edit: Added a few enemies, and terrain bits borrowing from my Flying Shark escapade.