More Monster Stuff

This is also stuff from a few years back, when I figured out which type of presentation to use. At first I wanted to do some hand drawn animated graphics, but I didn't actually want to draw a million animations. So maybe a gameboy style could work? But then the resolution would be too low for Kanji and basic UI.

Then I remembered the Famicom manuals and MSX FAN, which were printed in duotone red & blue. If I present the game as magazine pages, then I have both space and no expectation of animation (which seems unnatural in print). I love those bestiary pages with little texts and decorative nonsense all around. It's pretty unique as far as game presentation goes, but just the other day someone on twitter was doing game-print stuff, so maybe I should hurry. The page or page spread could feature a mishmash of stuff, like world maps, a little scenic location (e.g. Wasteland, Forest, etc), specs, and anything really. Some messy charm. Possibly I might feature a little ad-like space with a handheld, which comes out of the page and becomes real for some basic world movement as that might not make sense on the printed page. I wrote a map editor thing (in 2016) which uses 8 colour famicube specs for that, but it might increase the workload too much. I massively feature creeped as usual.

For print, red & blue duotone has a nice range as you can see on the MSX FAN page. It can do skin tone and near-black. I wonder if they did it optically back in the day, using filters to make two colour plates.

Anyways, I wrote a colour space converter a few years ago (2020), just a really dumb for loop which matched my duotone space to RGB and built a giant lookup table so I can do it on the fly quickly in the game or when saving assets. I offset a bit deliberately to get that print feel. It works pretty well. Greens and yellows fall away, noticeable on my conversion of the Pokémon picture.

It remains to be seen if I can actually whip up some quality monster in a print-able style. Probably inked outlines and some water colour. My vague lines don't quite have the confidence needed for ink though. I wish I could just use my Digimon stuff and be done as I already did a lot of that (on my site somewhere)...