A discussion about Rastan

[jayminer]

I've been reading here on EAB that quite some people are missing a port of Rastan to the Amiga (myself included!) and there was even some discussion about how such a port could be achieved. This got me thinking and since I've had some spare time recently I took some screenshots in MAME and started reducing them to something more feasable for the Amiga and came up with the following mockups:
http://driar.se/rastanmockup/

There are lots and lots of room for improvements, what I've done here is to reduce the colors to 15+transparent so all foreground and sprites are sharing a 15 color palette. The background is made up of attached sprites so they can only be 64 pixels wide but I think it would look better than going for Dual Playfield and would still retain the parallax effect.

Some manual work on the tiles could definitely make everything look better and also some more tweaks of the colors to make the "sprites" stand out a bit more and the background a bit more muted would probably help.

Since I'm not exactly a programmer I'm not sure how good this solution would be for keeping the game at 50Hz, the sprites in the game are rather big so maybe the blitter would struggle when lots of enemies are on screen? I read somewhere that the original updates the sprites at 25FPS so I guess that would be an option but I would rather go for 50FPS if possible.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Discuss!

Oh, and I have no plans on actually developing anything. This was just for fun, but if someone would be interested in coding I would definitely be interested in helping out with adapting the graphics.

[Predseda]

That background pallette for sky (is it DPaint default palette?) is AWFUL!

I wonder if the game could be re-created in Scorpion?

[jayminer]

The sky palette is pretty much exactly what it is in the arcade since the entire background seems to be only 16 colors. I doubt the used Deluxe Paint

But there are lots of things in Rastan that are very ugly, lots of bright pixels I don't approve of here and there. It could look way better.

[jayminer]

I added a screen from the arcade version for comparison
http://driar.se/rastanmockup/arcade1.png

[mcgeezer]

A stretch for an A500 to do Rastan properly (like all of the levels)

A decent challenge for the A1200 though, even then a big job.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by Predseda

I wonder if the game could be re-created in Scorpion?

Some things would probably have to be scaled back but if targetting AGA i think it'd be very doable in scorpion? There really are a lot of enemies on screen, and the parallax bg is too "big" to work with the ECS system but you could make a nice go of it with the AGA system..


Its not that different to the Castlevania port and a couple of other games in development. (Dante's other project Primal blade is a lot like Rastan)

[Galahad/FLT]

Rastan would have to be 32 colours minimum because of the variety of colouring of the enemies.

I would drop the parallax for outside sections, and would cheat the parallax effect in the stages where you ascend to get to the end of level boss by blitting a changing "background" where you see castle windows.

[jayminer]

I think a good 16 color palette with the parallax would be more enticing than skipping the parallax, not sure about the other levels though but here is my extraction of most tiles and I think most enemies from the first level. To me it doesn't look half bad and then with some more manual work like more dithering and some color changes here and there I think it could look really good.
http://driar.se/rastanmockup/tiles_16col.png

[TCD]

Some light reading:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=110469
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=94483

[gimbal]

Graphics is one thing, which sounds and music to use. The music in the arcade version seems pretty alright, the sounds are pretty terrible though.

[Kang]

Originally Posted by jayminer

To me it doesn't look half bad and then with some more manual work like more dithering and some color changes here and there I think it could look really good.

It doesn't look to bad at all

[jayminer]

I did spend a little more time on how a port/conversion of Rastan could look in 15 colors + attached sprites for parallax. On this picture I've changed the colors a bit and touched up some of the graphics.

http://driar.se/rastanmockup/rastan_modified.png

I'm still kinda curious how feasable a solution like this would be. I'm not very knowledgeable on the blitter and how fast it is - and since all sprites would be used for the parallax layer everything else would have to be blitted in 4 bitplanes.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by jayminer

I did spend a little more time on how a port/conversion of Rastan could look in 15 colors + attached sprites for parallax. On this picture I've changed the colors a bit and touched up some of the graphics.

http://driar.se/rastanmockup/rastan_modified.png

I'm still kinda curious how feasable a solution like this would be. I'm not very knowledgeable on the blitter and how fast it is - and since all sprites would be used for the parallax layer everything else would have to be blitted in 4 bitplanes.

I don't know Rastan very well, but have you checked if your basic palette setup also works with later levels?

Imo that's where most mockups have problems.
They usually only work with one level (most of the time the first one ; ), but get problems if you apply that setup to the whole game.

[jayminer]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

I don't know Rastan very well, but have you checked if your basic palette setup also works with later levels?

Imo that's where most mockups have problems.
They usually only work with one level (most of the time the first one ; ), but get problems if you apply that setup to the whole game.

I did some tests of later levels and tried converting some tiles from them using the same palette and it looked good enough to me. Sure I haven't tried all levels and it could become an issue but overall I think it would work and some colors of the palette could change between levels aswell.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by jayminer

I did some tests of later levels and tried converting some tiles from them using the same palette and it looked good enough to me. Sure I haven't tried all levels and it could become an issue but overall I think it would work and some colors of the palette could change between levels aswell.

Great!
Just take into account that you will always need the colors that your player character uses in every level.

The rest can be swapped.

Also, take the score and item display into account here. If you do the sky with sprites you won't have those a disposal for these, so you will have to blit the score and maybe need one from the pool of 15 blit colors for these as well or use one of those used by the Rastan Sprite/Bob.

Anyway, looks quite good! Keep up the work.

[jayminer]

I haven't thought much about the score and items and I think in worst case they could be displayed outside the active play area. I don't think the colors will be an issue for them either though but maybe having to blit them aswell every frame might be a bit overkill.

I did a quick mockup of the forest level, it looks a bit more brownish than the original which is a bit more gray, this could probably be improved upon. I haven't ripped any enemies from this stage so I just added some level 1 enemies to get some more life to the picture. The background is very sloppily drawn by me just to get a feel for it, I was thinking that on this level it would probably be enough with 3 color sprites for the background so it could be 128 pixels wide instead of 64.

http://driar.se/rastanmockup/rastan4.png

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by jayminer

I haven't thought much about the score and items and I think in worst case they could be displayed outside the active play area. I don't think the colors will be an issue for them either though but maybe having to blit them aswell every frame might be a bit overkill.

I did a quick mockup of the forest level, it looks a bit more brownish than the original which is a bit more gray, this could probably be improved upon. I haven't ripped any enemies from this stage so I just added some level 1 enemies to get some more life to the picture. The background is very sloppily drawn by me just to get a feel for it, I was thinking that on this level it would probably be enough with 3 color sprites for the background so it could be 128 pixels wide instead of 64.

http://driar.se/rastanmockup/rastan4.png

The lack of color is terrible

[jayminer]

Did some more work on how the forest level could look, the background is still kinda ugly though but I feel like it's getting there...

http://driar.se/rastanmockup/rastan4_new.png

[dlfrsilver]

that's better ;D

[TCD]

Originally Posted by jayminer

Did some more work on how the forest level could look, the background is still kinda ugly though but I feel like it's getting there...

http://driar.se/rastanmockup/rastan4_new.png

That mockup looks pretty good Fingers crossed you can find a coder for the game.