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Randy Larson3 years ago

I've wondered about this quite a bit. From the perspective of an old school, 8 color game, I would totally agree. My resolution for the camera is 64x64, so technically anything that I can fit into that space is within the dimensional requirement. And by that I  mean that I  would think that the smallest unit would be a single pixel, relative to that 64x64 camera resolution. It probably doesn't work out like that in practice.

Alas, I am not certain. And I am certain that I am not trying to argue, just expressing a question I have aloud.

And, thank you for thinking it has the makings of something good. Thankfully, the mortal coil of a game doesn't end with the jam.

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Paul593 years ago

Fair points but look at the sword on your opening screen and the tiniest particles as they disappear, they're made from many more pixels then one of the 'blocks' making up the left-hand wall (which represent units in your 64x64 grid). I think a lot of submissions have suffered from the same problem: the rendering seems to be beyond the programmer's control. Modern game engines sometimes make things harder than they should be, usually, and ironically, when aiming for simplicity. It's one of the reasons I've eschewed them and gone back to making simple pixel games with no cameras, canvases, shaders or lighting...beyond what I can create myself from raw pixels.

Anyway, back to your game, which I skipped over in view of the foregoing. How do I swing the sword? I'm suffering a rapid demise which prevents me from exploring further!

P.S. In your write up you mention Aseprite but there's a free fork of this, LibreSprite, at  https://libresprite.github.io/#!/ which is rather excellent.

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Randy Larson3 years ago(+1)

I was thinking about your original post, my reply and such. I was wondering about the rendering of the camera and such. Despite the rendering being set to a particular size, there is still the problem of the overall upscaling to a viewport that makes the display usable in any fashion. It seems that most entries set the display canvas to be something like 512x512. I went with that. That leads to the rendering engine to scale from 64 to 512. In that, the integrity of the single pixel will certainly be lost.

I was wondering about changing the unit pixel size to be something larger (say 10) so you can maintain an overall logical pixel size of 64. Given a 10x10 display pixels to be a single logical pixel, you could render the game at 640x640 with a single unit being an even chunk of that canvas. The author would then be entirely in control w/o the rendering engine needing to scale at all. Reading your last reply, this is where you have ended up yourself, it seems.

Anyhow, it is interesting to ponder. 

P.S., swing the sword with a left-mouse click (which I see I totally omitted from the controls section).

LibreSprite - I'll check it out. I was also thinking to fork and compile Aseprite. I didn't mind supporting them, though. It is a pretty nice tool.

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