+Nathan Strum Posted September 8, 2019 Share Posted September 8, 2019 I'm digging the 70's vibe of the multi-colored bricks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 8, 2019 Author Share Posted September 8, 2019 Well, here's an all-out let's make it really colourful version... I'm on the fence. But it is kind of '70s, I will give it that. sokoboo_20190908_COLOURED.bin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 8, 2019 Author Share Posted September 8, 2019 2 hours ago, NostAlgae37 said: I like this a lot, it's actually kind of beautiful and gives that artificial "Atari-world" type of feel to the game. But I'm not sure how others will feel about it, because it jumps the shark in terms of realism and they might prefer colors a bit more grounded in the natural world. I know.... we'll give the player-guy 3 legs. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NostAlgae37 Posted September 8, 2019 Share Posted September 8, 2019 1 hour ago, Andrew Davie said: I know.... we'll give the player-guy 3 legs. Wow, sounds more like '60s than '70s... Trippy, psychedelic, acid-type stuff. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 8, 2019 Author Share Posted September 8, 2019 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alex_79 Posted September 8, 2019 Share Posted September 8, 2019 (edited) On 9/6/2019 at 3:41 PM, Andrew Davie said: Clearly I don't feel like thinking much, so I've played with the colours instead. Here's a selection of colour combinations as used in the first 8 levels. It's quite hard to find combinations of 3 colours that look good, and in particular which (appear to) combine together into various combinations which ALSO look good, giving 8 "chronocolours". Anyway, this set is reasonably nice. I like it! On 9/6/2019 at 3:41 PM, Andrew Davie said: Edited Friday at 03:42 PM by Andrew Davie Because I hate this forum's editor. 9 hours ago, Andrew Davie said: One final bit of colour fun and I'll move on - I tried changing two of the three colours on every character line. Leaving the background 'ground' stripes unchanged. Here's a few screen grabs of some of the results. Interesting.... Beautiful effect indeed, but I think it makes things less recognizable, especially in the larger levels, if the walls on a line end up having the same or a similar color of boxes on another line. On a side note, what about a "fade in/out" effect at the start/end of each level by adding each color in sequence? Edited September 8, 2019 by alex_79 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted September 8, 2019 Share Posted September 8, 2019 1 hour ago, alex_79 said: Beautiful effect indeed, but I think it makes things less recognizable, especially in the larger levels, if the walls on a line end up having the same or a similar color of boxes on another line. IMO that's a bit over the top too. Some gradients might work, but all different colors do not suit the gameplay well. Fading in and out seems like a good idea. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 8, 2019 Author Share Posted September 8, 2019 (edited) Now THIS... I like! rainbow3.mp4 How more Atari can you get than a rainbow background? Edited September 8, 2019 by Andrew Davie Replaced video with one with a brighter background. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 8, 2019 Author Share Posted September 8, 2019 (edited) 2 hours ago, alex_79 said: On a side note, what about a "fade in/out" effect at the start/end of each level by adding each color in sequence? Neat idea - not sure how well it would work with brightness around 8 at the moment - so only 4 steps down. Many years ago I did a "mona lisa" demo bitmap with a fade incorporated. My recollection is that it worked, but wasn't really worth the effort. But you never know... now you've brought this up, i might have another go. bin00014.bin Edited September 8, 2019 by Andrew Davie I found the old binary with the fading mona. Better than I remembered, actually. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 8, 2019 Author Share Posted September 8, 2019 Ow! My eyes!! I am just leaving this video here for posterity - abandoned idea, of course. owmyeyes.mp4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 8, 2019 Author Share Posted September 8, 2019 Here is a NTSC-only version of the rainbow colour banding. The bands change (shift) from level to level, so we get the whole gamut of colours. The other colours are random, but limited to different to each other. I'm thinking this looks pretty good - may end up in the final game. This is NTSC-only because the rainbow effect is currently hardwired for NTSC and much more difficult to do in PAL colours. But I'll get there. sokoboo_20190908_NTSC_rainbow.bin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Karl G Posted September 8, 2019 Share Posted September 8, 2019 I think the crazy colors are fun, and could work for certain games. I don't think it works well for a puzzle type game like this, though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 8, 2019 Author Share Posted September 8, 2019 Well, I've got the PAL and NTSC 'rainbow' working now - it looks pretty good on both. I have tweaked the randomness of the colour choice for the other two colours so that they are more reasonable selections. i've changed the 'rainbow' so that it varies from level to level. The two other colours are random every time you start, even if you re-start the same level then you get a new colours selection. I think it's looking pretty good now. There are some absolutely gorgeous screen colour combinations. I do agree about the "crazy colours" comment above, but these are more subdued than out and out random, and I think they're OK. rainbowx.mp4 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alex_79 Posted September 8, 2019 Share Posted September 8, 2019 (edited) 4 hours ago, Andrew Davie said: Neat idea - not sure how well it would work with brightness around 8 at the moment - so only 4 steps down. Many years ago I did a "mona lisa" demo bitmap with a fade incorporated. My recollection is that it worked, but wasn't really worth the effort. But you never know... now you've brought this up, i might have another go. bin00014.bin 4 kB · 2 downloads I was thinking about a simpler effect: just start with all three colors set to black and then change them to their final value one at a time, without varying the brightness. Not a proper fading effect, but I think it would look fine. Thanks for posting the "mona lisa" demo. That's cool! 48 minutes ago, Andrew Davie said: Well, I've got the PAL and NTSC 'rainbow' working now - it looks pretty good on both. I have tweaked the randomness of the colour choice for the other two colours so that they are more reasonable selections. i've changed the 'rainbow' so that it varies from level to level. The two other colours are random every time you start, even if you re-start the same level then you get a new colours selection. I think it's looking pretty good now. There are some absolutely gorgeous screen colour combinations. I do agree about the "crazy colours" comment above, but these are more subdued than out and out random, and I think they're OK. rainbowx.mp4 2.54 MB · 1 download Nice! Did you remove the grey color from the rainbow or it just happens by chance to not being in the levels shown in the video? I ask because I think it looks better without it. Edited September 8, 2019 by alex_79 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NostAlgae37 Posted September 8, 2019 Share Posted September 8, 2019 9 hours ago, Andrew Davie said: He looks like a centaur! Somebody, make a Greek mythology game so that I can make sprites for it (I am only half-kidding about this, I love mythology)! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 8, 2019 Author Share Posted September 8, 2019 2 hours ago, alex_79 said: Nice! Did you remove the grey color from the rainbow or it just happens by chance to not being in the levels shown in the video? I ask because I think it looks better without it. Well spotted. Yes, I removed the grey colour. To do PAL, I had to have a system that would let me select the colours in an odd order, and drop some colours due to repeats. Since I had that requirement, that let me also use it for the NTSC and adjust what colours it used, too. I was also able to tweak the intensities so that they all look around the same. There is quite a range. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 10, 2019 Author Share Posted September 10, 2019 I've implemented a fade-in. It came out pretty good, I think. I can adjust the speed, but the video is set to what I think is about right. I can also, technically, fade a line at a time but this doesn't look quite as good as doing the whole screen at once. fade.mp4 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 10, 2019 Author Share Posted September 10, 2019 Here's the 'hybrid' line-by-line fade. What it does is limit the number of colours changed to (say) 7 in each fade cycle. There are 3 colours on each character line, so 24 colours to fade in all. This fades them all up, starting at the bottom each time, but only modifying 7 of them before exiting. So it is a kind of clunky line-by-line fade. Sometimes it looks great, sometimes clunky. Depends on the colours. linebyline.mp4 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 10, 2019 Author Share Posted September 10, 2019 (edited) Here's a binary with all those things. Works for PAL and NTSC Controls: SELECT= Enter level selection screen. Then, Joystick = change level displayed, button = start RESET = restart current level. Shows level screen. Use button to quick-exit and start, or just wait. Push boxes onto targets. Button/release = take back last move Button + joystick = look-around scroll. Release button to return "home" sokoboo_20190910.bin Edited September 10, 2019 by Andrew Davie 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+ZeroPage Homebrew Posted September 10, 2019 Share Posted September 10, 2019 14 minutes ago, Andrew Davie said: Here's a binary with all those things. Works for PAL and NTSC. Wow, it actually amazed me when I was able to move before the fade in finished doing its thing. LOVE IT! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 10, 2019 Author Share Posted September 10, 2019 (edited) I found and fixed a bug in the fade which always faded to a (quite) bright yellow for one of the colours, rather than the randomly selected colour. This caused everything to be a bit yellow and brighter than it should have been. It also meant that the colour variation wasn't there. Well, that's now fixed. But also, this version has a fade OUT at the end of each level. This actually works quite nicely and segues well to the level display screen. Thanks @alex_79 for suggesting a fade! You can get the latest binary (below) and here's a video for those who just want to see it in action... it looks a lot better "in person" than in the video, due to the low resolution of the video - the lines are being significantly reduced in brightness, and it's 'clunkier' in visuals of the fade. Check out the binary instead fading.mp4 sokoboo-20190910b.bin Edited September 10, 2019 by Andrew Davie Mentioning that the video is suffering from compression issues. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 10, 2019 Author Share Posted September 10, 2019 6 hours ago, ZeroPage Homebrew said: Wow, it actually amazed me when I was able to move before the fade in finished doing its thing. LOVE IT! That's asynchronicity what multitasking you for and does. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 10, 2019 Author Share Posted September 10, 2019 I'm finally back to "sexy". I spent some time working on the colour intensities and now have it pretty good. There are balancing constraints; you want things to be bright enough but not too bright, you want contrasts to be good but also colours have to mix properly. And it all has to work with randomly selected colours, and those colours need to mix right. And the mixes need to produce appreciably different colours that also look good. Anyway, fortunately most of the mixes look OK - even though random. I've upped the brightness on the background, and to my eye everything now looks hunky dory. I've also tweaked the fades - slightly faster - and of course the extra brightness in the background gives it more steps which looks good too. So, I might leave this version here for a day or so and stop doing so many updates Fingers crossed the video will look brighter, less clunky, and give a better impression of what it looks like on Stella. cols.mp4 sokoboo_20190911.bin 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 10, 2019 Author Share Posted September 10, 2019 (edited) Some GitHub statistics on Sokoboo... Edited September 10, 2019 by Andrew Davie 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Andrew Davie Posted September 10, 2019 Author Share Posted September 10, 2019 One nice thing about using version control for your source code is that you can run visualisations on the interactions between files and programmers. Here's a visualisation (using "gource") of my work on Sokoboo. Each of the dots is a file. You can see "me" frantically "running around" and touching files here and there. The lines to outlying groups of dots are directories. These sorts of animations look amazing for big projects. gource.mp4 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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