RE: [stella] Role-Playing Game Development

Subject: RE: [stella] Role-Playing Game Development
From: Erik Mooney <emooney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 13:09:04 -0400 (EDT)
> simulation).  This is, of course, not the same perspective as Ultima, but
> reflective playfield is pretty efficient!  (And the adventure engine has

Reflected playfield is very efficient, adding quite a bit of graphical
content with a very low computational kernel cost.

> But think tiling a limited number of prototypes, and especially think color
> coding to get more room.  Haunted House, Superman, Raiders, the Swordquest
> series, they all use these methods to some degree.  An RPG in a narrower
> scale like this has a more immersive feel than a wide perspective overhead.

The key word here is tiling.  Many, many NES games used that to create
large worlds... the Legend of Zelda (and Zelda II) dungeons are great
examples - Zelda II even used different images for "bricks" in each palace
to make it look different.  Metroid is also a great example.

I'm gonna atttach my old RPG kernel prototype here, to make it easy for
people to take a look.  IIRC, it uses screen tiling for both playfield and
player graphics.  It allows 16 different playfield arrangements, and each
screen can pick one of them and foreground/background colors.  As for the
scenery graphics, what it did was divide each screen into three areas
(separated vertically), and each area would get filled by a particular
tile, 3 tiles/screen.  You could use a generic "forest" tile (I think this
demo uses one tile twice) at no space cost.  It also has one line between
each tile, to be used for screen-sppecific events - that's the dude in the
upper left on this screen.  I think I remember calculating that I could
fit a 16x16 screen world (like Zelda) with lots of forest/mountain/whatnot
reuse into about 8k.

Attachment: r.bin
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