Quote:
Originally Posted by Codetapper
For those of you that thought they'd go down the dual playfield route, I have grabbed a couple of screenshots. Even with the greatest artist of all time, I am not sure how you could have a game that didn't look completely naff with only 7 colours for the entire foreground layer including enemies. (I am assuming the player is a sprite so you can ignore him!)
The tree section alone uses 9 colours, which would be all the palette used in one foul swoop. Explosions would have to be shades of brown with this palette, the lava enemy would be brown, the grey baddies would be brown etc.
I've also zoomed the trees so you can see the colours a bit better.
Finally I've included a long strip of 4 images. The original with background, then 3 versions in 32, 16 and 8 colours respectively with the background removed.
Admittedly this is just going into Photoshop and reducing the colours (and personally I think Photoshop is pretty useless at picking a palette) so an artist could definitely do better. But I can't see how on earth you could make it look good in 8 colours when some entries would have to remain static for things like the trees, dirt and monsters!
It makes you realise how good some graphic artists are. The Ocean France guys were particularly good at using only 16 colours. And for the record, the beautiful dual playfield Amiga games like Beast tended to be Amiga originals where the gameplay could restrict enemies to strips so the copper could go to town and increase the colours. You don't tend to see many arcade conversions running in dual playfield mode.
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Everything below the floor line can be copper reloaded, nothing interferes with that, colour cycling can be used for the fire/lava at the bottom.
Stuff like that will help to not make the trees so glaring.
There has to be some cutbacks.
Yes Ocean France were good with 16colours, but with Toki they had to compromise on screen size.