I can't really do graphics. And I do not know anybody who wants to put in the work to draw it for me. For me the goal was: graphics looking like they were created for VGA or Super Nintendo.
So I looked at two long running animated series and thought of some interesting locations. It seems if these series run for several seasons, they have been everywhere. And a location you thought of is not really available, think of something else (usable evil lairs were hard to find).
So clean up the scenes (remove any foreground animation and people), add stuff you want, rescale to 4:3, rescale to 256x212, convert to screen8 with your own graphics convertor to make it look like I wanted. Add the animations, add foreground stuff (like walking behind parts of the scene) and add the player (we called it "ego") as a huge scaling softsprite (max size ingame is 44x96).
The scaling part is done real time and was needed because most scene have a perspective that requires it. Otherwise a lot of scenes were just not usable. Same goes with walking "behind" parts of the scene, like the parking meter in the 1st scene. The ego is mirrored using the VDP transfer direction provided, scaling is done with pixel skipping.
Congratulations on winning the second place in de MSXDev contest! In my opinion, this was by far the most interesting and technical impressive game, and should maybe even have been the first place!
I was blown away by the fantastic graphics, sound and atmosphere. The great functioning and also very impressive game-engine and fun writing completed this masterpiece. I was very fortunate to playtest this game and ran in some difficult to understand (for me at least) and complex puzzles. With some tips from the developers I finished it. For the most part the puzzles were very funny and rewarding to solve them. Looking forward for a second playthrough and can't wait for the physical edition to become available.
Muchos kudos for NOP for making this piece of art for our 'outdated' MSX machines!
Some OpenMSX notes:
1.
The alternating of the screen effect in SD records awkward as seen here: Alternating "bug"
2.
Pressing F9 to speed up the loading is almost done every time while recording, still records in realtime.
OpenMSX still an amazing package, very recommended for SD, thank you.
1. Did you look at the recording with a media player on your PC? YouTube doesn't always show a constant frame rate or only shows half of the frames and thus you may miss frames to get an interference effect.
2. Yes, that's intentionally done. It records all frames and timing between them is as normal.
