Hello world,
as it felt like I was spamming someone's else thread, I decided to start one.
Demake of Mana
"Secret of Mana" was an amazing adventure for it's time and introduced new features (such as the ring menu, three player RPG) and the graphics where well made. It is still fun to play it today.
I am not sure I can get anything playable any time soon (so far I only have a simple walk-around and follow-me program), but perhaps someone else finds the sprites useful for other projects.
I scaled a screenshot of SoM to 84px width and decided 8x11 would be a good size for the character's sprites. Especially in monochrome that turned out to be limiting and difficult
Even NES sprites are typically larger, plus they utilize multiple colors instead of using outlines (Face color directly followed by shirt color).
The possibility of displaying gray on the Nokia-Screen seems tempting, but I did not want to rely on it too much. The following are typically working monochrome as well.
It feels a bit wrong to take one of the prettiest SNES-Games and butcher the sprites to 8x11. but it was fun to do. The many enemies and NPC are really a lot of work, so far it is mostly a bunch of standard poses and design studies. I started animating some.
Next would be to finish the animation for all of the sprites (Phew...) and the maps.
I would have to make multiple mask layers in order for making it possible to switch different grey scale settings in the menu.
Ideally, I want to recreate a Nintendo/Nelsonic - Style Game wristwatch.
The Nokia display would be great due to the low power consumption. Though the form factor of the later color LCD breakout or even a smaller 128x96 LCD would make designing this easier... Though would result in having to create my own graphic library and circuitry.
Decisions, decisions
I would be greatful for any advice on how to improve on the sprites, general advice on what to keep in mind when designing such small sprites and how to get the animation right at these scales...