atari2600land's Blog - Saturn on the Game Gear

RSS Bot · February 15, 2018

So I had an idea for the background image for the Game Gear game I was working on. Since it takes place in space and it's on a Sega system, why not a picture of Saturn? Actually I thought of Saturn being a Sega system later. I thought a ringed planet would be good, and the only one I know of is Saturn. So I redesigned the rocket. Got rid of the USA letters on it because I wanted it to be white. So I put the image in and this is what Saturn looks like on the Game Gear:

But that image alone took up 20% of the space I had to work with. Yet I think I can manage to make the game with 55% space left. And since the background won't change, it looks really neat. The Sega Game Gear has two palettes: One for the background and one for the sprites. The maximum number of colors for both is 16. So you can have 32 different colors on the screen at the same time. I don't think that will be a problem for a game such as this, and it wasn't for the Oranges game. Since the background won't move, I can use all 16 colors for it, which still leaves me with 16 for the sprites. And you can change the palette whenever you want, which is how I got the rocket's firing effect. The fire below the rocket is the same image but different colors.

I had a different image in where Saturn was larger, and that took up more tiles and I only had 49.99% of space left compared to the 55% I have now. Sometimes it's good to experiment, especially with images.

The next time I work on this game I will attempt to make the rocket fire missiles.

Attached thumbnail(s)